The 87% vs 27% success-rate gap between Six-Sigma and non-Six-Sigma organisations on agentic-AI deployments reflects pre-existing measurement discipline, not the DMAIC methodology itself. Agents require a clean baseline, defect definition, documented root-cause analysis, and a change-management gate — four conditions that ISO 9001, ITIL, SRE, or HACCP practices produce just as reliably.

Correction log

1. 19 Apr 2026Body rewritten from WP-era slop. Status moves from rewrite-in-progress placeholder to Up. New thesis: the causation runs the opposite direction from the vendor narrative — the measurement discipline was the prerequisite, the methodology name doesn't matter. 60-day review.
2. 28 Apr 2026Slug migration to §6a-compliant URL: from-dmaic-to-ai-agents-how-traditional-optimization-methods-accelerate-agentic-ai-success → dmaic-for-agentic-ai-deployment. Body unchanged from 19 Apr rewrite, only the URL changed. Old slug 308-redirects to new. Reason: the long descriptive slug carried §6a-grade friction (88+ chars, vendor-cliche framing) and Google's quality algorithm had flagged the original URL as low-quality (per the 28 Apr 2026 GSC drilldown showing it in the 'Crawled - currently not indexed' bucket). The clean slug preserves the analytical content while removing the URL-level quality penalty.