The Last Mile to Agentic Value - Closer Than We Think

Abstract

Enterprise agentic AI adoption is stalling not because the technology fails, but because practitioners cannot produce evidence that satisfies examiners. Debug traces tell engineering what executed. Compli- ance replay tells regulators why a decision was made, what alterna- tives were rejected, and under what authority the system acted. This paper defines compliance replay as the missing evidentiary primi- tive for agentic systems—a standardized, auditable representation for third parties, analogous to what financial statements are for firms. We specify the minimal five-element construct (Who, What, State, Branch Logic, Counterfactual), illustrate the transformation with con- crete banking and insurance examples, and call for practitioner align- ment on this standard. Compliance replay cannot be retrofitted. Ev- ery agentic system designed today without the required infrastruc- ture is accumulating technical debt that will block deployment later. The gap is bridgeable, but only through deliberate design.