Who is watching the AI agents?
09-14-2026IMPACT COUNCIL
Who is watching the AI agents?
As AI agents begin acting across enterprise systems, organizations need a new way to supervise them; one that operates at the same speed as the technology itself.
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For better or worse, AI agents are now a part of the workforce. They write code, analyze documents, respond to customers, coordinate workflows, and make decisions across multiple business systems with very little human involvement.
AI agents have proven they can do the work. Now, enterprises must prepare for a world where they do far more of it. With Gartner predicting that the average Fortune 500 company will run more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, enterprises need to lay a strong foundation now to ensure proper governance of the technology.
THE OLD MODEL DOESN’T SCALE
Historically, governance has been built around human systems. Security, compliance, privacy, and risk teams reviewed new systems before they went live, identified concerns, and worked with the business to resolve them. That model worked because software changed slowly and deployment cycles stretched over months.
With AI, that goes out the window. An agent can make thousands of decisions before a traditional review process even begins. As organizations move from a handful of AI agents to........
