“This comes up in every discussion that I have with a CIO or somebody who’s thinking at a strategic level about agents, is governance: ‘How do I make sure that I have my hands around everything that’s being built?’” Muehmel says. “There’s a real fear of shadow agents that have been built up by some smart people in the organization who are doing things that we don’t have a full grasp on.”
IT and business leaders overseeing AI projects also need to ensure that agents, in particular, need to be tightly coupled to business processes, he adds. Rogue agents that don’t map to business processes can create distrust among users, he says.
“What’s unique about agents is that, in a way, they’re supposed to be almost new colleagues or collaborators for the businesspeople in the marketing department, in the finance department, in operations,” Muehmel says. “If those people aren’t able to have confidence in the way that the agent is performing, then there’s a real trust deficit where you could end up building a bunch of things that people are hesitant to use.”