Agency vs. Control vs. Reliability in Agent Design

The ability to perform high-agency tasks is important, but it is just as important to ensure that agents can execute tasks competently, reliably, and consistently, when deploying them in high value use cases. Why is customer support such a challenging space? Over the past few months, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced. Products like ‘computer use’ from Anthropic and OpenAI, and DeepResearch by OpenAI, demonstrate LLMs’ increasing capability in high-agency tasks. High-agency agents are those where an agent’s actions are primarily self-governed, constrained only by its environment, and a goal. However, most examples of high agency agents operate in ideal environments which provide complete knowledge to the agent, and are ‘patient’ to erroneous or flaky interactions. That is, the agent has access to the complete snapshot of its environment at all times, and the environment is forgiving of its mistakes. This contrasts sharply with customer support agents, like Fi ... Read full article.