The AI Agent Governance Playbook
81% of teams have moved agents past planning into testing or
live use. Only 14% report full security sign-off. This is a
practitioner's guide to closing that gap at the action
layer, built around the one question every tool call has to
answer: can this agent, on behalf of this user, take this
action, right now?
What's in the playbook
- The governance concepts you need: why governing an agent is not governing a person, where the accountability gap comes from, and why the tool call is the highest-leverage place to enforce.
- Frameworks you can build against: the six things to enforce at the action layer, a reference architecture for the identity, DLP, and SIEM systems you already run, and a mapping to NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, the EU AI Act, and the OWASP LLM Top 10.
- Pull-outs worth keeping: a one-page guardrails-vs-governance decision map, and an enforcement-readiness checklist you can score your own program against today.
