Thinking
We write about what we see running AI agents in production — the infrastructure decisions that matter, the failures that cost money, and the tradeoffs nobody talks about. No tutorials. No hype.
Enterprises operate an average of 12 AI agents, but 50% run without any centralized oversight. 29% of employees use unsanctioned AI agents. Gartner projects $10 billion in remediation costs by mid-2026. Agent sprawl is the new shadow IT, and it makes decisions.
RSAC 2026 revealed a governance crisis: 63% of organizations cannot enforce limits on their AI agents, 60% cannot shut down a misbehaving agent, and shadow AI agents are growing 466% year-over-year.
We gave an agent team a brief and a market gap. A few hours later we had a working product live on Vercel — scanner, AI analysis, landing page, pricing tiers. The interesting part is not that agents can write code. It's that the cost of testing an idea has dropped to near zero.
The decision to self-host or go managed is not obvious. Self-hosting gives you full control but costs you engineering time. Managed hosting costs money but gives you uptime. We walk through the real tradeoffs — not the marketing version.
Shared hosting is fine for websites. It is not fine for AI agents that handle customer data, make API calls with your credentials, and run autonomously. A short piece on why tenant isolation is the first thing we got right.
An AI agent that goes down for 8 hours a year sounds fine until those 8 hours happen on a Friday night when your WhatsApp bot is the only thing answering customer questions. We explain what uptime means in practice and how we achieve it.
We publish irregularly. If something we wrote was useful, or if you disagree with something, email us. hello@cairnagents.com