How to Take an AI Agent from Prototype to Production: A Production-Readiness Checklist

This article provides a comprehensive production-readiness checklist for AI agents, emphasizing that a successful prototype does not equate to production readiness. It outlines key control areas including identity management, state retention, tool authorization, behavior evaluation, observability, cost bounding, failure containment, and service ownership. The author advocates treating these as separate control planes with measurable release gates, and recommends a gradual rollout strategy starting with shadow mode, then canary traffic, before expanding authority. The content is highly technical and focused on software engineering best practices for deploying AI systems in enterprise environments.