Incident response for AI agents is different from ordinary uptime response. The system may be available while the behavior is wrong. A drill helps the team practice containment, evidence capture, customer communication, and rollback before the first real incident.
Pick one realistic scenario
Use a scenario that could happen in the current product: the agent sends the wrong customer message, acts on injected RAG content, exceeds a cost threshold, or recommends an unsafe operational change. Avoid science-fiction scenarios that do not affect the next launch.
Assign roles before the drill starts
Name the incident lead, engineering owner, security reviewer, support contact, communications owner, and decision maker. If ownership is unclear during a drill, it will be worse during a live incident.
Practice containment
Decide how to pause the workflow, disable a tool, reduce permissions, switch to manual review, or roll back a prompt/model change. The drill should prove these controls actually exist.
Capture the evidence trail
Collect prompts, retrieved sources, tool calls, approval decisions, logs, user-visible outputs, model versions, and deployment timestamps. Missing evidence is itself a readiness issue.
End with follow-up work
Write the gaps as tickets: missing trace fields, unclear owner, weak customer message, no rollback switch, or no test fixture for the failure. A drill without follow-up is only theater.
Quick checklist
- Run the drill before expanding tool permissions.
- Use a real workflow and realistic user data shape.
- Measure time to containment.
- Check whether support can explain the incident clearly.
- Convert drill gaps into launch blockers or follow-up tickets.
How to use this
Use this guide as a working review aid, not as a compliance certificate. A team preparing an AI agent for production should pair it with traces, test cases, policy decisions, and a named owner for each unresolved risk.
Related IBBS resources
- AI Agent Incident Response Checklist
- AI Agent Rollback Checklist
- AI Agent Risk Review Meeting Agenda
AI Agent Incident Drill Template: A tabletop drill template for practicing what the team will do when an AI agent takes or recommends the wrong action. Read it at https://ibbs.ai/2026/07/07/ai-agent-incident-drill-template/
If your team is preparing an AI agent for production and wants an outside review, start with the AI Agent Readiness Self-Assessment or review the sample audit report.