Ask a room of developers about agents today and you will get plenty of answers. Almost everyone has built one, and most have a demo they are proud of.
The harder question is what happens after that, when the agent has to hold up against real customers, real data, and real consequences. At DevSparks Chennai 2026, Arvind Purushothaman, Global Cloud Consulting, Microsoft Practice and Alliances Leader at EY GDS, opened with a version of it. He asked how many people in the room had built an AI agent, and plenty of hands went up. Then he asked how many had built one that made it to production for a business-critical system. "I think that's where the numbers dramatically drop," he said. "Not because of anybody's fault, but that's how it is."
That gap is the whole problem, and it is not a model problem. Cloud, low code tools, and open model APIs have pushed the entry barrier close to zero. What has not changed is the difficulty of industrializing what you build. "Access to intelligence is not the bottleneck, but the ability to industrialize is going to be the bottleneck," said Arvind Purushothaman.
Drawing on a cricket analogy, he said that hackathon builds are like net practice, where a few lines of Python and an API key let you rehearse your reverse scoop all afternoon. The match is different. You need 12 runs off six deliveries under pressure, and the strokes only matter alongside the ability to read the situation.
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