The standard for agents you can trust: Lessons from the federal front lines

In the first installment of Agentic in Action — a series about real AI deployments, not demos — Snorkel AI’s Kevin Olivieri sat down with three people who have spent their careers where trust isn’t optional: Chris Sniffen, Federal Applied AI Lead at Snorkel AI; John Hickey, President of August Schell; and Mike Baca, CIO of August Schell. The conversation focused on government and regulated industries, where reliability and accountability are mission-critical. They get into why pilots stall on the way to production, why generic benchmarks don’t cut it for high-stakes work, what “good” actually means for an agent, how human experts make decisions that are hard to quantify, and the three questions every leader should be asking their technical team right now. Lightly edited for clarity and brevity. Kevin Olivieri: Welcome, everyone. This is the first Agentic in Action event we’ve done. The series is about real AI deployments — not demos — and what it actually takes to get these systems into production. Today we’re focused on government and regulated industries, where trust, reliability, and accountability are mission-critical. We’ll talk about what breaks when teams move from experimentation to deployment, and what leaders need to see before they…