Enterprise software vendors spent 2025 shipping autonomous agents — systems that take an instruction, decompose it into steps, and execute those steps against live business systems without a human in each loop.
Their customers spent 2025 building approval queues to put the humans back.
This is not resistance in the usual sense. The companies installing the queues are the same ones that bought the agents, often enthusiastically, and they are not trying to slow adoption. They are trying to answer a question the software does not answer for them: when an agent takes an action that turns out to be wrong, who is accountable, and what evidence exists that the action was authorised?
In regulated industries the question has a formal answer and the answer requires a record. A pharmaceutical company cannot let a procurement agent issue a purchase order against a validated system without an audit trail that satisfies its own quality organisation. The trail is the queue.
Vendors have begun shipping the audit infrastructure as a feature, which is the correct response and an implicit concession. The initial pitch was that agents would remove steps. The current pitch is that agents will execute steps faster while a governance layer records them — a smaller claim, and a considerably more sellable one.
Deployment data from three large systems integrators suggests the practical ceiling on autonomy is not technical. Agents are permitted to act unsupervised in roughly the categories where a junior employee would be: reversible, bounded in cost, and unlikely to touch a regulator’s field of view.