AI teams agreed on the wrong answer in 75% of debates — and lower token bills hid the failure

VentureBeat · VB Staff · 2026-11-04 17:02 UTC

Outshift’s Vijoy Pandey explains why AI agents agree on wrong answers—and why enterprises need coordination beyond shared context and lower token costs.

Presented by Outshift

Enterprises that give AI agents shared memory and carefully tuned context still end up with agent teams that fail at shared goals, says Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president and general manager of Outshift by Cisco, the company's incubation arm. In fact, a recent Berkeley study found that roughly a third of the agent failures it examined could be attributed to misaligned goals.

Much of the problem is that agents loaded with all the institutional knowledge a company can supply still pursue the goals of their own role, Pandey told VB CEO Matt Marshall during VentureBeat’s Agentic Infrastructure Stack Summit. Put a sales agent, an engineering agent, a product agent, a finance agent, and a legal agent together to close a deal, and each one optimizes for what its own function rewards.

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