Your identity match rate looks healthy. Then one shaky device guess merges two profiles, and a loyal buyer loses three years of order history.
The problem isn’t matching. It’s authority.
The agent treats a probable match like a confirmed login — same permission, weaker evidence. Aggregate accuracy hides the tail cases right up until support gets the email.
Give the agent three ceilings:
- Confirmed login: unlock profile merging and full personalization.
- Probable match: category-level content only, no profile changes.
- No clear signal: treat the visitor as new, leave both records alone.
This pattern applies to every agent you run. Confidence and permission are different things. A weak signal may justify an action that’s easy to reverse. It should never justify one that corrupts customer data, sends money, or changes a contract.
Tomorrow, have an engineer list the agent’s actions by cost of being wrong. Set an evidence bar for each. Block anything above the bar by default. Log every exception. Then watch how cautious sessions convert over 30 days — category-level content often works well enough that expensive identity resolution matters less than assumed.
Until stronger evidence arrives, let uncertainty limit authority. That’s a delegation of authority matrix.
InTheValley senior engineers know how to build this into the agents you’re already running.
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