From PoC to Production: Why Reliability is the New Frontier for AI Agents

Here’s a great chat I had with Marc Hardwick, were we discussed the evolution of the Hitachi Application Reliability Center (HARC) and how it is being adapted to meet the challenges of the current AI landscape, and a bunch of other interesting stuff 🙂 TLDR;

The Evolution of HARC

• Traditional HARC: For the last three years, HARC has focused on managing IT operations for customers in a reliable and consistent way.
• HARC for AI: As AI technology evolved, we extended these reliability principles to the full AI stack – including machine learning and GenAI – to ensure these tools are maintained, observable, and secure.
• HARC Agents: This is the latest evolution, specifically designed to manage autonomous agents that can communicate, read data, and act on behalf of users.

Bridging the “AI Slop”

• I’ve highlighted a major industry challenge – the “AI slop”: the gap between a Proof of Concept (PoC) and a reliable production environment.
• While many companies can build a PoC, I emphasised that maintaining and keeping agents in production at scale is difficult; HARC Agents provides the engineering framework to make this possible.

Key Components of HARC Agents

• Agent Library: Hitachi brought over 200 pre-built agents to market, developed across the “One Hitachi” group for various sectors like finance, insurance, and industrial energy.
• Minimum Viable Agent: To ensure consistency, these agents are built using a standard set of rules and technology frameworks that work across the entire Hitachi group.
• Agent Management System: This provides a “single pane of glass” dashboard where users can control security, observe behaviour, and manage telemetry for all agents in one place.
• R202 Framework: Our framework (of Reliable, Responsible, Observable and Optimal) to ensure agents are responsible, secure, and governed.

Business Model and ROI

• Managed Services: Unlike hyperscalers who sell infrastructure, Hitachi’s model is based on engineering excellence and managed services, focusing on the work required to operate and maintain these agents.
• Outcome Focused: Whilst financial ROI is important, the greatest value often comes from human augmentation and providing tools that the workforce finds indispensable.

We announced the official UK launch of HARC Agents on October 15th 2025 in London.