Who Owns the Boundary? What Breaks When Agent Teams Build on Other Teams' Services

Most agent failures in production are not model failures. They are boundary failures.

As agents multiply inside an enterprise, two kinds of work emerge: owning a business service, and building an agent on top of it. These are rarely the same team, and the friction shows up fast. Domain knowledge lives with the service owner but has to be encoded in the agent, so agent builders re-create it in prompts and it drifts. A “skill” (a domain’s business capability packaged for agent use) gets treated as an API wrapper, so nobody clearly owns it. Observability tells the skill owner that a call succeeded, but not whether the agent used it correctly. And changing a shared skill silently breaks consumers nobody knew existed.

Drawing on our experience running a shared Data & AI platform at LATAM Airlines, and on a recent panel with LangChain on what breaks when AI scales, this talk gives practitioners a concrete model: how to define skill ownership, which contracts and signals must cross the boundary, and how to evolve shared skills safely. It covers both patterns: one team owning service and agent, and many teams building across boundaries.