SLO Design for Agentic AI Systems — Why Traditional Reliability Metrics Break (and What to Use Instead)

The problem with applying traditional SLOs to AI agents SLOs work beautifully when "good" is observable. An API either returns 200 or it doesn't. Latency is measurable. Availability is binary. You instrument, you baseline, you commit to a number, and you burn down an error budget when reality diverges. AI agents break every one of these assumptions. After a quarter of running agentic systems against production infrastructure, here are the three failure modes I keep running into when teams apply