Agentic AI is here - how strong is your governance?

This week, we have already discussed the high cost of shadow - or ungoverned - AI and the questions senior leaders need to be asking themselves.

So, let's now look at the next step: deciding to do something about it!

In addition to building AI literacy across your business, having a good strategy in place - and maybe doing some discovery work - you now need to take a closer look at Agentic AI security.

Agentic AI is everywhere in 2025. By 2028, it will be embedded in 33% of enterprise applications (vs. <1% in 2024). What is needed right now is to adopt a mindset and the tools to secure your systems during this expansion period.

So, what is Agentic AI Security?

Agentic AI Security refers to the use of a system of coordinated, goal-driven, autonomous AI agents that strengthen your organization's security posture. These systems can plan, adapt and act in alignment with your risk environment - often with minimal human intervention. The goal is to leverage AI's full potential for security in a safe and sustainable way, going beyond what a single, narrow AI agent can do.

When deployed effectively, Agentic AI can detect both known and emerging threats and trigger countermeasures in near real time, with accuracy shaped by the quality of training data, fine-tuning and contextual risk factors.

It's core capabilities are:

• Planning and reasoning: determining the optimal sequence of actions to achieve a defined security goal.

• Memory and statefulness: retaining insights from prior actions, including what tools were used and why.

• Action and tool use: executing targeted actions or invoking specialized tools to respond to threats autonomously.

It's key benefits are:

• Faster threat response

• 24/7 autonomous response

• Adaptive protection

• Augmented security teams

• Enhanced accuracy

• Scalability

• Resilience through learning

But here's what keeps CISOs up at night!

🔔 Agentic AI doesn't just respond to prompts. It ACTS and makes autonomous decisions.

🔔 It chains together multiple tools and APIs.

🔔 Agentic AI operates 24/7 without human oversight, so no "human in the loop".

🔔 It spawns non-human identities with broad system access.

🔔 Agentic AI retains memory across sessions.

🔔 One compromise has the potential to cascade across business-critical systems faster than traditional security controls can respond.

‼️ The shift from automated to agentic AI security is already underway.

❓The question? Is your organization ready to trust AI agents to defend it?

💡 The solution? Build security and governance INTO agentic AI systems from day one - not as an afterthought.

Need help with your agentic AI security preparedness? Reach out to discuss how we can help you strengthen your AI governance framework.