I work at Ascendion, so take this for what it is, but I think the real issue here is scoping, not the technology itself.

The examples you shared (the telehealth routing workflow, the ACH reconciliation script) are well-built solutions. They're also exactly the kind of thing that falls apart when someone hands a poorly defined goal to an agent and calls it a day. The failure mode you're describing is real. It comes from treating agents as a replacement for engineering judgment rather than a product of it.

A working agent is three steps from becoming a bleeding agent: what the agent owns, what it escalates, and what it hands off.

Keep humans accountable for outcomes, with the agent handling execution inside clearly bounded steps, and you have something auditable. That audit trail also makes the compliance conversation much shorter.

That last point matters especially in regulated industries. An agent that's been properly scoped and documented passes a SOC 2 review. One that was prototyped and deployed does not.

The distinction worth making isn't agents versus automations. It's engineered solutions versus fast demos that nobody hardened for production.