Your AI Agent Has No Nervous System

Official Schedule Context

Most agents ship with solid evals and zero runtime observability. When something breaks in

production — wrong answer, runaway retry loop, or silent tool failure — you're debugging blind. You

can see the output, but you can't see what the agent believed when it made the decision. This talk

walks through how to instrument agentic pipelines with OpenTelemetry: capturing system context at

every step, making prompt state and tool call outcomes visible as structured data, and governing

token consumption as SLOs instead of discovering overruns on an invoice. Attendees will leave with

three takeaways: an understanding of telemetry for multi-step agentic workflows, a pattern for

capturing system context at the span level so teams know exactly what the agent saw before it acted,

and a framework for visibility into token budget and behavioral drift before something goes sideways

in production. Telemetry is the nervous system. System context is the memory. Token budgets are the

vital signs. None of it is optional.

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