Your AI Agent Isn't Broken. Your Company's Truth Is.

Short summary

An AI invoice-processing agent double-paid an invoice because the ERP showed 'unpaid' (stale data), the bank showed 'paid' (correct), and Slack held an unrecorded vendor hold. The agent worked perfectly; the company's distributed, conflicting truth systems failed. The author frames this as 'epistemic collapse'—the missing 'epistemic infrastructure' layer that reconciles scattered systems and distinguishes observation from truth from history.

• •AI agents fail not from poor models, but from poor data infrastructure and system inconsistency
• •Companies lack 'epistemic infrastructure'—a unified truth layer across scattered ERP, bank, Slack, email systems
• •Humans were previously this reconciliation layer; explicit systems architecture is now required

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.