Why 'Brownfield' Deployments Break Agent Architectures — Lessons from Google

Last week I attended Google AI Agents Reloaded Live Labs Benelux and ended up winning in the "Agents for Good" track. 🎉 Between lab sessions and back-to-back talks, I filled several pages of notes - and a lot of it challenged or refined assumptions I had about building agents. This isn't a recap of "what is an AI agent." It's the non-obvious stuff: where the real traps are, what the data actually says, and which design decisions have outsized consequences in production.