Avoiding agentic debt spiral

AFTER A DECADE of racing to the cloud, adopting microservices and automating workflows, Indian enterprises gained efficiency but also accumulated hidden debt. Now a new form is emerging: faster, harder to detect and far more consequential. This time, the debt isn’t technical—it’s cognitive. It’s agentic debt.

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Imagine a large Indian e-commerce marketplace launching a simple refund agent to boost customer satisfaction. It works, until it starts approving refunds outside policy.

Finance then builds a stricter version, and regional ops creates another for festive surges. One agent becomes three, each making different decisions for the same issue. What began as efficiency quickly turns into a fast-growing liability.