Experience matters more than hype. Why most agentic projects fail—and what 15 years of production-hardened experience reveals about building them right.

Lightbend is a software company specializing in reactive architecture and cloud-native development solutions for building distributed systems. Through its platform, Lightbend provides tools, frameworks, and support services for developing scalable, resilient, and high-performance applications. Developers can learn about reactive programming principles, microservices architecture, and cloud-native development practices, and leverage Lightbend's solutions to build robust and responsive distributed systems.

Lightbend

Agentic AI systems are fundamentally distributed systems that require production-hardened infrastructure to succeed. While the market shows significant hype with high valuations and low revenue multiples, 95% of AI projects are failing due to infrastructure engineering challenges rather than lack of imagination. These systems introduce new complexity layers including stochastic components, specialized GPU infrastructure, long-lived workflows, and side-effecting actions. Building reliable agentic systems requires experience with durability, observability, backpressure, and fault tolerance - lessons learned from 15 years of distributed systems development at scale.

Agentic AI: Why Experience Matters More Than Hype

Agentic systems are distributed systems—with new classes of complexity

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