After a few months, my ai report generator agent only got useful once I made it boring

I built an agent to generate weekly client reports. First version was ambitious: it pulled data, wrote analysis, drew conclusions, suggested next steps. Demos great. In production it was a problem, because when the analysis was wrong nobody could tell where it went wrong, and when it was right nobody fully trusted it anyway. The thing that actually shipped was a much dumber version. The agent now does one job well: it pulls the numbers, drops them into a fixed template with fixed section headers, and writes one plain sentence per section describing the movement ("signups up versus last week, refunds flat"). No interpretation, no recommendations, no story. The judgment layer went back to a human, which is where the client wanted it anyway. What the agent removed was the hour of copy-paste and formatting, not the thinking. Two lessons from this. First, the value was in the assembly and the consistency, not the intelligence. A report that looks identical every week is easier to read at a glance than a smart one that reorganizes itself each time. Second, the moment an ai report generator starts drawing conclusions, someone has to verify those conclusions, and that verification often costs more time than the agent saved. I still think there is a place for the analysis version, but only where the reader is technical enough to check it. For everyone else, boring and predictable won. Anyone else find their reporting agents got better as you took capability out?