GM once had robots painting each other instead of the cars.
Paint, you can see. Your agentic loop tokens are invisible until you get the bill. The hallucinations in your strategy documents may remain unnoticed forever.
GM nearly bankrupted itself by going all-in on automation in the 1980s. Ford just recently wasted billions, eroded goodwill and publicly humiliated themselves trying to replace experienced engineers with AI.
Automation is not new.
What’s new is how quickly you can proliferate it in your company’s software and your employees workflows.
What’s new is that it’s invisible and non-deterministic.
What’s new is recursively using the output of one system as the input to another.
Those robots were busy. Paint was being used. But what was being created wasn’t value, it was a mess.
Your agents are busy. What are they painting?
There’s real value to be created with AI. But not without the old lessons from automation and human factors engineering.
The Crossfactors Framework maps the failure modes that compound when technology meets human endeavor. Your agentic pipelines are running straight into them.