Agents in the Wild: Where Research Meets Deployment
Agentic systems — large language model (LLM)-based architectures capable of reasoning, planning, acting, and coordinating with tools and other agents — are rapidly transitioning from research prototypes to production-scale deployments across domains such as software engineering, scientific discovery, and finance. While academic work has emphasized benchmarks and algorithmic innovation, deployment raises new challenges around robustness, safety, and reliability. This tutorial brings together researchers and practitioners to explore advances in reasoning and planning, multi-agent coordination, and evaluation, highlighting open challenges arising from deployment experience. Through applied case studies in pharmaceutical discovery and financial systems, we analyze common design patterns that make agentic systems successful, and discuss practical mitigation strategies for failure modes, such as verification pipelines, fallback mechanisms, and human-in-the-loop supervision. Attendees will gain a comprehensive view of the field along with concrete design patterns, evaluation checklists, and templates for safe and reliable deployment across industries.