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Closing the agent governance gap

The emerging challenge with AI agents isn’t simply preventing attacks from external rogue AI agents; it’s accounting for what your own agents are doing on the inside. AI agents are already rewiring how organizations operate, and we’re only in the first inning.

The emerging challenge with AI agents isn’t simply preventing attacks from external rogue AI agents; it’s accounting for what your own agents are doing on the inside. AI agents are already rewiring how organizations operate, and we’re only in the first inning.

In this environment, AI agents have created edge cases that reveal real risks when deployed without sufficient security controls. And further, no one can predict the impact of advances coming over the next six months. All of this reinforces the need to get security fundamentals right. If you’re building with AI agents right now, you know the real challenge isn’t just getting them to run. It’s knowing what happens when they act on their own. That starts with three questions. What agents do I have in my environment? What are they doing? And what are they capable of doing?

Agentic governance is problematic because enterprises must track a sprawling agent landscape AND ensure each agent is built and deployed securely. Also, agentic adoption is frictionless. Creating an agent is only one API call away from a model provider. Vibe coding means any curious employee can build an agent. This triple proliferation of vendor agents, platform native agents and homegrown agents compounds the problem.

There is the famous security adage that you can’t protect what you can’t see. Right now, most organizations lack basic visibility into what agents are in their environments. According to Anthropic, 82 percent of organizations have discovered unregistered agents in their network, and 57 percent already deploy agents for multi-stage workflows.

In addition to basic visibility, enterprises also need to understand other related attributes, such as who onboarded the agents, what access privileges they have and how they are behaving as designed. For example, an over-provisioned agent, like an email agent with 50 tools attached, would be suspect and worth investigating.

In context

  • Topic: Estrategia y Gobierno de TI — Decisiones de portafolio, costo total, gobierno y marcos de referencia.
  • Source: CIO
  • Published: 20/10/2026

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Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.

Why it matters

There is a wide gap between a company that has technology projects and one that has a technology strategy. The first accumulates initiatives; the second decides what it will not do. Moves like this are usually the moment somebody at the top finally wrote down the list of what gets left out.

My filter is always the same: does this change a decision, or only a tool? If at the end of the quarter the same people are approving the same things by the same criteria, there was no transformation, there was a purchase. The difference shows up in the committee minutes, not in the press release.

What usually goes wrong

What usually goes wrong is the part never discussed with the areas that will carry the work. It gets decided at the top, communicated downward, and the resistance shows up not as opposition but as slowness. Nobody says no; everything simply takes twice as long and nobody can explain why.

What to watch

  • Whether business metrics appear or only delivery metrics — cost per transaction beats percentage complete.
  • The real calendar of contracts and renewals: that is where you see whether the move was strategic or was an expiry date.
  • What gets switched off to fund the new thing; if nothing does, the budget will hurt in six months.

How I read this entry

I would treat it less as a technology story and more as a market signal. If one player moves this way, in twelve to eighteen months the rest will have to answer something. Better to decide now, calmly, what that answer will be, rather than improvise it when a client asks.

This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
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Source. CIO

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