Reasoning Provenance for Autonomous AI Agents: Structured Behavioral Analytics Beyond State Checkpoints and Execution Traces

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Agent Execution Record (AER), a structured provenance primitive for capturing and analyzing autonomous AI agents' reasoning processes beyond traditional state and execution logs.

Contribution

It formalizes reasoning provenance as a first-class primitive, enabling detailed behavioral analytics and counterfactual testing for autonomous AI agents.

Findings

AER captures intent, observations, and inferences at each step.

Enables population-level reasoning pattern mining and confidence calibration.

Preliminary deployment shows practical utility in root cause analysis.

Abstract

As AI agents transition from human-supervised copilots to autonomous platform infrastructure, the ability to analyze their reasoning behavior across populations of investigations becomes a pressing infrastructure requirement. Existing operational tooling addresses adjacent needs effectively: state checkpoint systems enable fault tolerance; observability platforms provide execution traces for debugging; telemetry standards ensure interoperability. What current systems do not natively provide as a first-class, schema-level primitive is structured reasoning provenance -- normalized, queryable records of why the agent chose each action, what it concluded from each observation, how each conclusion shaped its strategy, and which evidence supports its final verdict. This paper introduces the Agent Execution Record (AER), a structured reasoning provenance primitive that captures intent, observation, and inference as first-class queryable fields on every step, alongside versioned plans with revision rationale, evidence chains, structured verdicts with confidence scores, and delegation authority chains. We formalize the distinction between computational state persistence and reasoning provenance, argue that the latter cannot in general be faithfully reconstructed from the former, and show how AERs enable population-level behavioral analytics: reasoning pattern mining, confidence calibration, cross-agent comparison, and counterfactual regression testing via mock replay. We present a domain-agnostic model with extensible domain profiles, a reference implementation and SDK, and outline an evaluation methodology informed by preliminary deployment on a production platformized root cause analysis agent.