r/AI_Agents: A Year of Shipping AI Agents to HVAC, Contractors, and Law Firms — What Actually Breaks That Demos Never Show

A developer with a year of running AI automation at service businesses — HVAC, contractors, notaries, law firms — catalogs the production failure modes that demos obscure, framed explicitly for builders deploying agents to non-technical clients. The post covers what breaks at integration points, expectation gaps with small-business owners, and edge cases that only appear under live operating conditions rather than controlled testing.