Most AI teams ship behavior changes to 100% of users on every deploy — no canary, no segment, no kill switch. Web teams stopped doing this in 2012. AI teams are about to learn why.
Feature flags are table stakes in software engineering. In agent systems they're almost nonexistent — prompts, tool access, model selection, memory policy, and autonomy level all change globally the moment you ship. That's why your "small" prompt tweak just broke 12% of your users and you found out from a Discord screenshot.
This talk walks the feature-flag patterns agents specifically need — beyond the standard boolean-toggle. We'll cover segment-targeted prompt variants, per-tool access flags, model-routing flags, autonomy-level flags (suggest vs. auto-approve vs. auto-execute), memory-policy flags, and the kill switch every agent system should have on day one but almost none do. The demo is live: a real agent on stage handling a real conversation while flags are flipped from a dashboard — tool access revoked mid-call, autonomy downgraded mid-call, and the money shot, a kill switch that stops a misbehaving agent mid-sentence in front of the audience.
You'll leave with:

A taxonomy of the six flag types agents need that web apps don't
A middleware pattern that drops between any agent loop and any flag backend you already use (Unleash, Flipt, LaunchDarkly, or homegrown)
A rollout playbook for shipping agent changes the way you ship anything else that touches real users

If your agent platform doesn't have a kill switch, this talk pays for itself in one deploy.