A proactive agent runs on a trigger, with no human watching at the moment of action. That inverts the risk model, and the interviewer is listening for whether you separate notifying from acting.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A proactive agent runs on a trigger, with no human watching at the moment of action. That inverts the risk model, and the interviewer is listening for whether you separate notifying from acting.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
