The "Read-Only" Trap: How to Build Agents That Can Safely Write to ERPs
Most enterprise AI today is stuck in the “Read-Only” trap . Teams have built chatbots that can read documents (RAG) and query databases (text-to-SQL). That’s real progress. But when you ask, “Update the inventory count,” or “Process a refund for Order #992,” the answer is usually the same: “I cannot perform that action.” That’s the ROI ceiling. A read-only AI behaves like a research assistant. A read-write AI starts to look like a digital employee. So why aren’t more teams building agents that can take action? Because the fear is justified. Engineering leaders don’t want a probabilistic model touching systems like SAP, Salesforce, or Oracle. One bad loop could trigger 1,000 refunds. One hallucinated digit could change an invoice by an order of magnitude. The blast radius is simply too high. Still, if we want real value, we have to move from “chat” to “work.” Here’s the pattern that makes that shift possible on Databricks: Unity Catalog Functions + the “Human Brake.” The “Undo” Problem:...