The Math That's Killing Your AI Agent: Compound Probability and Why 85% Accuracy Fails at Scale
Here’s a number that should worry you if you’re shipping AI agents to production: 0.85¹⁰ = 0.197. That’s the success rate of a 10-step agentic task when each individual step has an 85% accuracy rate. Not 85% success overall — 19.7%. Your highly accurate agent fails 4 out of every 5 tasks it attempts. This is the compound probability problem, and it’s the hidden failure mode of most production AI agent deployments. ...