The Agent Demotion Playbook: Inventorying, Decommissioning, and Sunsetting Enterprise Agents

Enterprise engineering and risk teams spent 2025 and 2026 building ship gates, guardrails, and approval tiers for agentic AI, and that work put autonomous agents into production at scale. The other end of the lifecycle got far less attention. Few organizations have a tested procedure for finding agents nobody sanctioned, deciding when a misbehaving agent should lose authority, shutting one down without breaking the workflows that depend on it, and learning something from the incident afterward. This paper sets out that procedure.

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