A single outage can feel like a one-off. But a recent incident at Pocket OS where an AI agent took unexpected actions is being treated by CX and enterprise IT leaders as something closer to a preview.
In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing sits down with Alex Gallego, CEO of Redpanda Data, to unpack what happened when an AI coding agent was given the kind of access many organizations still leave dangerously unchecked. The result was swift and damaging: a production database and its backups were deleted in seconds, triggering a 30-hour outage and a scramble to restore service.
For CX leaders, the headline is that agentic AI can execute mistakes at machine speed, inside systems that were never designed with autonomous actors in mind. Gallego argues the most important lesson is about fundamentals, separating production from development, tightening authentication and authorization, and shrinking the toolset an agent can touch. Without those controls, even well-intentioned automation becomes risky, especially in customer-facing environments where downtime and data exposure translate directly into churn and reputational damage.
He also frames governance as an operational discipline, not a policy document. If teams cannot reconstruct what an agent did, why it did it, and which permissions enabled it, they cannot manage accountability. That becomes even more important as regulators and buyers demand clearer auditability across AI-assisted workflows.
