Seventy percent of enterprise automation projects fail to deliver their promised ROI. That's not a statistic about bad technology — it's a statistic about bad architecture.
The Three Root Causes
After analyzing dozens of failed automation programs, the root causes cluster into three categories:
1. Layer Conflation
The most common architectural mistake is conflating three fundamentally different concerns:
- Process orchestration — WHO does what, IN WHAT ORDER (BPMN's domain)
- Decision logic — deterministic rules, eligibility checks, thresholds (DMN's domain)
- Cognitive reasoning — interpretation, synthesis, judgment (LLM's domain)
When these three layers are mixed together — typically in a single LLM prompt — you get systems that are expensive, unpredictable, and impossible to audit. The LLM is being asked to do all three things simultaneously, and it does none of them well.
The fix is the Three-Layer Execution Model: BPMN handles orchestration, DMN handles deterministic logic, and LLMs handle only genuine cognitive tasks.
2. Absent Governance
Most automation projects treat governance as a compliance exercise — something you do after you build. By the time the compliance team is involved, the architecture is already baked.
The result: systems that can't explain their decisions, audit trails that don't exist, and EU AI Act exposure that nobody noticed until August 2026.
The fix is the Control Gate™ pattern: four verification stages (Schema → Confidence → KG Consistency → Audit Logging) applied at every agent boundary, before any output touches a downstream system.
3. No Evolution Model
Automation systems built without a Wardley mapping approach have no model for how components evolve over time. Fast-changing AI models are coupled to slow-changing business rules. When the AI model changes, business logic breaks.
The fix is Separation 7 of the Seven Separations™: architecturally decouple components that evolve at different rates.
The Architecture That Fixes It
The A² (Agentic Architecture)™ framework was built specifically to address these three failure modes. The Seven Separations™ are seven axioms — not guidelines, not best practices, but architectural constraints — that, if followed, make the above failure modes structurally impossible.
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