Agentic Product Launch Readiness Checklist (2026)

Use this checklist before you ship an agent that can take actions (create/update records, send messages, change permissions, trigger deployments, issue refunds).

1) Define the “Autonomy Ladder”
- List the agent’s modes: Suggest → Execute-with-approval → Auto.
- For each mode, document which tools/actions are allowed.
- Specify which roles can enable higher autonomy (admin-only by default).

2) Permissions & Policy
- Implement least-privilege scopes per connector (read vs write; object/field-level if possible).
- Create policy rules in plain language (e.g., “Never email external domains”; “Refunds capped at $100 without approval”).
- Add budgets: per-run and per-day/month token/compute caps, plus max tool calls per run.

3) UX Controls (Trust)
- Add previews/diffs for any write action (before/after payload).
- Require explicit confirmation for medium-risk actions.
- Add step-up verification (2FA or admin signer) for high/critical actions.
- Provide Undo or compensating actions (where true undo is impossible).

4) Observability & Audit
- Generate a run_id for every agent session and propagate through model + tool calls.
- Log: prompt/template version, retrieved sources, tool inputs/outputs, approvals, final side effects.
- Provide customer-facing audit UI + export (SIEM-friendly where relevant).
- Add replay capability (reconstruct what the agent saw and did).

5) Evaluations & Release Process
- Build an offline eval set from real workflows (at least 50–200 representative tasks).
- Track metrics: task success rate, policy violation rate, takeover rate, latency p50/p95, cost per successful task.
- Add regression gates: prompt/tool changes can’t ship if they degrade key metrics beyond thresholds.
- Canary releases: start at 1–5% traffic and monitor violations and rollback triggers.

6) Safety & Abuse Resistance
- Test prompt injection scenarios via documents, emails, tickets, and web content.
- Validate tool call constraints (schema validation, allowlists, idempotency keys).
- Add stop conditions to prevent loops (max steps, max time, max spend).
- Red-team quarterly (or monthly for high-risk domains) and track fixes like security vulnerabilities.

7) Pricing & Unit Economics
- Measure tokens per successful task and cost per successful task.
- Implement model routing (cheap model for easy tasks; premium model only when needed).
- Decide packaging: bundled monthly allowance + metered overages.
- Build admin budgeting UI to reduce procurement friction.

8) Incident Response (Productized)
- “Kill switch” to pause the agent per workspace.
- Ability to revoke connector tokens instantly.
- Customer support runbook: how to retrieve logs, replay runs, and remediate.
- Postmortem template for Sev-1 agent incidents (what happened, blast radius, prevention).

Launch criteria suggestion:
- Low/medium-risk workflows: policy violations <1% and stable p95 latency target.
- High-risk workflows: require approvals + violations <0.5% before expanding autonomy.
- Critical workflows: keep in gated beta until you have mature audit exports and incident tooling.