The accountability challenge: It’s not them, it’s you
Until now, governance has been focused on model output risks with humans in the loop before consequential decisions were made—such as with loan approvals or job applications. Model behavior, including drift, alignment, data exfiltration, and poisoning, was the focus. The pace was set by a human prompting a model in a chatbot format with plenty of back and forth interactions between machine and human.
Today, with autonomous agents operating in complex workflows, the vision and the benefits of applied AI require significantly fewer humans in the loop. The point is to operate a business at machine pace by automating manual tasks that have clear architecture and decision rules. The goal, from a liability standpoint, is no reduction in enterprise or business risk between a machine operating a workflow and a human operating a workflow. CX Today summarizes the situation succinctly: “AI does the work, humans own the risk,” and California state law (AB 316), went into effect January 1, 2026, which removes the “AI did it; I didn’t approve it” excuse. This is similar to parenting when an adult is held responsible for a child’s actions that negatively impacts the larger community.
The challenge is that without building in code that enforces operational governance aligned to different levels of risk and liability along the entire workflow, the benefit of autonomous AI agents is negated. In the past, governance had been static and aligned to the pace of interaction typical for a chatbot. However, autonomous AI by design removes humans from many decisions, which can affect governance.
Considering permissions
Much like handing a three-year-old child a video game console that remotely controls an Abrams tank or an armed drone, leaving a probabilistic system operating without real-time guardrails that can change critical enterprise data carries significant risks. For instance, agents that integrate and chain actions across multiple corporate systems can drift beyond privileges that a single human user would be granted. To move forward successfully, governance must shift beyond policy set by committees to operational code built into the workflows from the start.
A humorous meme around the behavior of toddlers with toys starts with all the reasons that whatever toy you have is mine and ends with a broken toy that is definitely yours. For example, OpenClaw delivered a user experience closer to working with a human assistant;, but the excitement shifted as security experts realized inexperienced users could be easily compromised by using it.
For decades, enterprise IT has lived with shadow IT and the reality that skilled technical teams must take over and clean up assets they did not architect or install, much like the toddler giving back a broken toy. With autonomous agents, the risks are larger: persistent service account credentials, long-lived API tokens, and permissions to make decisions over core file systems. To meet this challenge, it’s imperative to allocate upfront appropriate IT budget and labor to sustain central discovery, oversight, and remediation for the thousands of employee or department-created agents.
Having a retirement plan
Recently, an acquaintance mentioned that she saved a client hundreds of thousands of dollars by identifying and then ending a “zombie project” —a neglected or failed AI pilot left running on a GPU cloud instance. There are potentially thousands of agents that risk becoming a zombie fleet inside a business. Today, many executives encourage employees to use AI—or else—and employees are told to create their own AI-first workflows or AI assistants. With the utility of something like OpenClaw and top-down directives, it is easy to project that the number of build-my-own agents coming to the office with their human employee will explode. Since an AI agent is a program that would fall under the definition of company-owned IP, as a employee changes departments or companies, those agents may be orphaned. There needs to be proactive policy and governance to decommission and retire any agents linked to a specific employee ID and permissions.
Financial optimization is governance out of the gate
While for some executives, autonomous AI sounds like a way to improve their operating margins by limiting human capital, many are finding that the ROI for human labor replacement is the wrong angle to take. Adding AI capabilities to the enterprise does not mean purchasing a new software tool with predictable instance-per-hour or per-seat pricing. A December 2025 IDC survey sponsored by Data Robot indicated that 96% of organizations deploying generative AI and 92% of those implementing agentic AI reported costs were higher or much higher than expected.
