Enterprise AI initiatives are drowning in prototypes that never reach production — a phenomenon called the 'Prototype Mirage.' Agents that perform well in demos fail in production due to reliability issues (stochastic decay in multi-step workflows), evaluation brittleness (74% rely on unsustainable human-in-the-loop review), and context drift when business processes evolve. The fix requires aligning agents to enterprise OKRs using a Guided Autonomy model that earns trust incrementally, combined with engineering discipline: structured evaluations, LLM-as-a-Judge, token economics, safety via data lineage, and scalable performance testing. Vibe-coded demos are proof-of-concepts, not products.
Table of contents
1. The Illusion of Success:2. Defining The Prototype Mirage3. Alignment to Enterprise OKRs4. Path ForwardSort: