Tech Explained: Here’s a simplified explanation of the latest technology update around Tech Explained: Inside the Shift: Why your agentic AI pilot probably will fail (and what that says about you) in Simple Termsand what it means for users..
In our new feature segment, “Inside the Shift”, we leverage our expert analysis and supporting data to go in-depth and tell the insider stories about some of the biggest challenges facing the legal, tax, accounting, corporate, and government areas
Picture this: It’s 2028, your law firm spent real money on an agentic AI pilot, and now it’s quietly been shut down. No press release, no victory lap — just a post‑mortem that nobody wants to read. In our latest Inside the Shift feature article, we see that such a future is very likely unless firms start preparing for agentic AI in a way that’s very different than how they think they should.
The big idea is simple but uncomfortable: Success with generative AI (GenAI) does not mean your organization is ready for agentic AI. GenAI works because it’s forgiving. You can paste text into a tool, get a decent answer, and move on — even if your data is messy and your workflows live in people’s heads. Agentic AI doesn’t work that way. It expects clean data, documented processes, and clear rules. If your firm runs on institutional memory, workarounds, and a kind of just ask Linda problem-solving process, then the system will eventually break down.
To examine this and many more situations, the Thomson Reuters Institute (TRI) has launched a new feature segment, Inside the Shift, that leverages our expert analysis and supporting data to tell some of the most compelling stories professional services today.
Our latest Inside the Shift feature, Premortem: Your 2028 agentic AI pilot program failed by Bryce Engelland, Enterprise Content Lead for Innovation & Technology for the Thomson Reuters Institute, walks us through two fictional but painfully familiar failure stories of how two separate firms handled their agentic AI pilot programs.
The author explains how the first firm moves fast after crushing their GenAI rollout and assuming agentic AI is just the next logical step. Everything looks great in a sandbox; but then the system hits real‑world chaos: Undocumented exceptions, fragmented document storage, and conflict checks that only work because humans intuitively know when something feels off. One bad intake decision later, client trust is damaged and the pilot is frozen. In this example, the tech didn’t fail — the organization did.
The second firm goes the opposite direction. They’re cautious, thoughtful, and obsessed with governance. They build guardrails, limit risk, and launch a perfectly reasonable pilot. And then… nothing happens. Attorneys ignore the system — not because they hate AI, but because using it only adds risk with no reward. If it works as it’s supposed to, nothing changes; but if something goes wrong, they’ll be blamed. So, unsurprisingly, the rational choice is to nod in meetings and quietly keep doing things the old way until the project dies of inertia.
The challenge is that “preparing” doesn’t mean what most people think. It doesn’t mean buying early, and it doesn’t mean waiting for maturity. Rather, preparing means understanding now why these systems fail, and building the institutional capacity to avoid those failures when the technology arrives in full.
The feature article points out the common thread here: These failures have very little to do with AI capability; rather, they’re about incentives, documentation, and institutional honesty. Firms that succeed with agentic AI won’t be the ones that buy in early or wait patiently. The winners, the piece explains, be the ones doing the boring, unsexy work now: Writing things down, fixing information architecture, identifying hidden dependencies, and aligning rewards so adoption isn’t all risk and no upside.
In short, this article isn’t a warning about technology. It’s a warning about pretending your organization is ready when it’s not — and mistaking optimism or caution for preparation.
So, dive a little deeper behind the headlines about AI adoption and how to make agentic AI work for your organization. Click through and read today’s Inside the Shift feature. It might help you see more clearly than before whether the path your organization is pursuing with agentic AI will carry it over the goal line and into the next decade… or leave your team watching from the sidelines.