There’s a sentence in our AI governance I’d defend above almost all the others: if an agent takes action, a human owns it, and that ownership is never transferable to the machine.
It sounds obvious written down. In practice it cuts against a drift you can already feel in AI-forward organisations. As agents take on more of a workflow, drafting it, executing it, monitoring it, sometimes redesigning it on the fly, a vacuum forms around the question of who answers for it. The old owner steps back, sometimes with relief; the process “runs itself” now. When something goes wrong, the explanation arrives in passive voice: the agent did it. And accountability, once it goes vague, doesn’t come back on its own. I’ve watched versions of this movie with outsourcing and with SaaS. The technology changes; the abdication is identical.
For critical infrastructure this cannot be allowed to happen, so we’ve made the rule structural rather than aspirational. Every activity an agent performs has a named human owner. That owner doesn’t approve every action, that’s neither possible nor the point. What they own is the design: what the agent may and may not do, what data it reaches, what it escalates and to whom, how its performance is measured, and when it gets retired or retrained. When the agent errs, the first question isn’t “what did the machine do?” but “how what did we not get right in the design, build, and management of that agent that it got this wrong” That question has an addressee. The passive voice does not survive it.
There’s a quiet benefit beyond safety. Ownership of this kind forces leaders to actually understand the work the agent is doing, which, as I’ve written before, is understanding many organisations lost in the SaaS era. The rule doesn’t just prevent abdication. It rebuilds literacy.
Look at your most automated process today and ask one question: who owns this, by name? If the answer involves a vendor, a team, or a shrug, you’ve found your exposure. The agents are coming either way. The owners have to come first.