Many engineers rightfully view every step in a financial workflow as a potential point of failure, because services go down and networks go offline. Yet there's often an even bigger danger lurking at the spaces in between those steps, because waiting is often where problems accumulate. As the application waits for account verification or settlements, it might restart when a new version is deployed, or its container may crash, or the hardware it's running on might fail. The longer the process runs, the more likely that these or other problems will occur.
AI agents introduce another source of delay: people. Some approvals may arrive in seconds, while others may take hours or days. The agent must track the current state, and to keep the business moving, may escalate if a deadline passes, choose an authorized alternative, or cancel the operation by compensating for previously completed steps.
How can a system wait reliably for as long as required and act immediately when a deadline expires? How can it recover from software or hardware failures without losing known progress or needlessly repeating model calls? How can engineers see what the agent is doing right now? How can the compliance team see what it did last week?
Durable Execution is the foundation that makes all of this possible. A Durable Execution platform, such as Temporal (MIT-licensed open source), records an application's progress and detailed results of every important step. If the application is interrupted, it uses that information to automatically recover the complete application state and then continue from where it left off. Model and tool results become part of that recorded progress, allowing the agent to resume without repeating completed work or wasting tokens unnecessarily. Durable timers allow the agent to wait reliably for any duration, whether seconds or months. The application can also await a specified condition, optionally with a defined time limit, and take action when it receives a message from an external system. These applications are written using normal code, in a standard language such as Python or TypeScript, and can run on standard infrastructure.
If you'd like to find out more about how Durable Execution can help you build reliable agents, stop by the Temporal booth in the Expo Hall for a whiteboarding session with technical staff.