Why Enterprise Agent Deployments Fail: A Field Taxonomy

Abstract

Enterprise agents retrieve privileged data, select workflow steps, invoke tools, and modify organizational state, yet public evidence conflates canceled pilots, incorrect runs, unsafe actions, and uneconomic services. This paper develops an evidence-grounded field taxonomy of enterprise-agent deployment failure from a structured synthesis of academic research, technical benchmarks, enterprise surveys, standards, and public incidents available by June 30, 2025. Failure is defined at four nested levels (run, service, workflow, program) and attributed across eight causal domains spanning mission and value logic, control specification, state integrity, deliberation, tool execution, coordination and supervision, runtime reliability, and organizational absorption. The evidence does not support a universal failure rate, but it shows that short-task model competence is insufficient evidence for reliable, repeated, policy-constrained, tool-using work, and that consequential failures emerge at system boundaries that lack proportional assurance. The paper contributes a causal cascade, incident codebook, testable propositions, and deployment gates linking evaluation to authority, reversibility, observability, economics, and organizational learning.