Security, risk and compliance in the world of AI agents

AI agents are rapidly becoming foundational to enterprise operations. Whether triaging service tickets, automating policy enforcement, customizing user experiences or managing regulatory documentation, AI agents are no longer confined to experimental labs or innovation sandboxes. They are actively shaping how businesses deliver services, make decisions and scale operations.

These agents differ significantly from traditional bots or deterministic robotic process automation (RPA) systems. Built on large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and orchestration frameworks, they can reason, learn and act in ways that are context-aware, adaptive and often non-deterministic. 

In a recent survey, over 90% of enterprise AI decision-makers reported concrete plans to adopt generative AI for internal and customer-facing use cases. Yet, this enthusiasm arrives amidst a lack of regulatory clarity and governance models that are still catching up. As one Forrester analyst report notes, the generative AI boom has thrust businesses into new territory where unknown risks abound. 

This transformation calls for a re-examination of how we think about risk, trust and control. As these agents interact with sensitive systems and high-stakes workflows, governance, risk and compliance (GRC) functions must evolve from static oversight to embedded, real-time governance. 

What exactly are AI agents? 

AI agents are software programs designed to autonomously perform tasks by perceiving their environment, making decisions and executing actions. Unlike rule-based bots, agents: 

• Understand and interpret natural language 
• Access internal and external data sources dynamically 
• Invoke tools (like APIs, databases, search engines) 
• Carry memory to recall prior interactions or results 
• Chain logic to reason through complex multi-step tasks 

They may be deployed through: 

• Open-source frameworks like LangChain or Semantic Kernel 
• Custom-built agent stacks powered by internal LLM APIs 
• Hybrid orchestration models integrated across business platforms 

Real-world examples across enterprise domains include: 

• IT and helpdesk. AI-powered virtual agents are being integrated with IT service management (ITSM) workflows to autonomously handle common issues such as password resets, outage reports and provisioning requests — reducing ticket volume by up to 40% and accelerating mean time to resolution. 
• Legal operations. AI has transformed legal research and contract analysis. AI agent are already supporting due diligence, regulatory interpretation and policy documentation, significantly reducing manual review hours and increasing throughput for teams. 
• Customer support. AI is being used to analyze conversation history, past purchases and intent in real time. It personalizes responses for millions of monthly interactions, improving first-call resolution and enabling seamless escalation to human agents when confidence thresholds aren’t met. 
• Human resources. Enterprises are deploying AI agents to tailor onboarding journeys, recommend training modules and answer benefits-related queries. For instance, some companies use agentic systems to navigate policy FAQs and surface role-specific documentation dynamically, cutting HR support ticket volume dramatically. 
• Finance and research. AI agents are being used to distill complex financial analysis into digestible summaries for users, enabling more timely, context-relevant insights and shortening response cycles from days to minutes. 

The expanding utility and autonomy of agents demand GRC frameworks that are as dynamic and context-aware as the agents themselves.

Why GRC must pay attention

Unlike static systems, AI agents introduce an entirely new class of risk. Agents blur traditional boundaries between data, logic and action. Their ability to improvise means they may: 

• Hallucinate plausible but incorrect answers (e.g., fabricated legal citations) 
• Chain tools or APIs in unanticipated ways 
• Interact with systems without clear authorization models 
• Learn behaviors that conflict with policy 

When deployed at scale — across thousands of use cases and multiple departments — AI agents create a highly interconnected, fast-moving surface area that traditional governance mechanisms cannot keep pace with.

The result? Increased susceptibility to: 

• Data exfiltration via poorly scoped memory or storage (e.g., shadow AI inputs leaking IP or PII) 
• Prompt injection attacks causing system behavior overrides or information leakage 
• Access escalation through misconfigured APIs or tokens 
• Broken audit trails due to ephemeral logic and prompt-based outputs 

These risks require a new class of governance controls that operate continuously and in alignment with the speed and logic of agents.

Understanding the AI agent lifecycle: 4 critical stages

To build effective oversight, we must first understand where and how agents function. The agent lifecycle spans four key stages:

1. interaction/origination

Agents are activated via user prompts, messages, system events or workflows. They interpret intent, fetch context and initiate action. 

Threats: 

• Prompt injection or adversarial inputs 
• Impersonation or spoofing 
• Overcollection of personally identifiable information (PII) 

2. Processing

Agents process inputs, retrieve data, format outputs and prepare action chains. This is where task orchestration and tool use occur. 

Threats: 

• Storage in insecure locations (cloud buckets, temp files) 
• Overreach in data access due to lax ACLs 
• Hardcoded tokens or expired secrets 

3. Decisioning

Agents execute business logic, leveraging LLMs or decision rules to produce outcomes — e.g., approving refunds, submitting documents, classifying content. 

Threats: 

• Biased or hallucinated decisions 
• Output divergence (different answers to the same prompt) 
• Lack of reasoning traceability 

4. Reporting/logging

Outputs are stored, surfaced or forwarded into dashboards, documents, tickets or user systems. These create records for review, learning or audit.

Threats: 

• Log gaps or untraceable agent actions 
• Sensitive content in cleartext or unencrypted logs 
• Inability to replay decisions post-fact 

GRC must align with this lifecycle to proactively identify, monitor and mitigate risks as agents transition from intent to action. 

Scaling complexity: The multi-agent environment

What begins as a single-agent workflow can quickly grow into a multi-agent ecosystem, where tasks are distributed, memory is shared and decision logic spans multiple models. Examples include: 

• A helpdesk bot that calls a user validation agent before ticket submission 
• A contract summarizer that forwards content to a redaction agent 
• A marketing agent that uses customer analytics from a segmentation agent 

In these scenarios: 

• Data may flow across agents without proper boundary enforcement 
• Prompt history and memory may persist across chains 
• Version control becomes difficult when multiple agents co-evolve 

Recent research has even shown prompt infections propagating like viruses between agents, raising the need for secure communication layers. 

Without explicit policies for agent scope, data retention and orchestration logic, risks cascade: 

• Chain-of-thought corruption 
• Identity spoofing across agent hops 
• Conflicting decision paths from inconsistent model grounding 

GRC must evolve to manage multi-agent ecosystems where governance cannot end at a single agent’s boundary. 

Reimagining the CIA triad for agentic workflows

The traditional CIA triad — confidentiality, integrity, availability — requires reinterpretation: 

We must add three more pillars to future-proof AI governance: 

• Explainability. Why did the agent decide X? 
• Traceability. What data, model or prompt version drove that outcome? 
• Auditability. Can we reproduce that decision months later? 

Redefining foundational principles like CIA underscores the need for GRC models purpose-built for autonomous systems.

The human role in governing agents

As agentic systems become more capable, they also become less predictable. This elevates the role of forward-operating GRC professionals who can: 

• Interrogate agent behavior and outputs 
• Anticipate ethical and legal edge cases 
• Escalate ambiguous or high-impact decisions 
• Shape human-AI delegation boundaries across workflows 

These individuals aren’t traditional compliance monitors. They are adaptive, strategic and AI-fluent. They bring domain context, ethical judgment, foresight and governance design into AI-heavy environments. 

Creating an effective security and compliance posture in agent-led environments means cultivating this new human capability alongside the deployment of technical controls. This human-centric approach reinforces that effective GRC is as much about organizational design as it is about technical control. 

Aligning to global regulatory frameworks 

As agent-driven workflows touch regulated environments, privacy and compliance become paramount. The landscape is rapidly evolving: 

Regulatory risks escalate when: 

• Agents persist data without lawful basis or consent 
• Model drift moves outputs beyond the evaluated risk zone 
• DSAR (data subject access requests) don’t capture agent memory or reasoning 
• Enterprises can’t reconstruct or explain decisions made via complex prompt chains 

To meet expectations, GRC teams must extend compliance coverage to include: 

• Prompt structure, context history, memory retention logic 
• Model versioning and release logs 
• Third-party data access via tools, APIs, plugins 

Emerging regulations validate the urgency for enterprises to embed granular, traceable GRC capabilities throughout agent workflows. 

Where GRC teams must focus

To enforce trustworthy AI at scale, GRC organizations must proactively embed governance into five pillars: 

1. Identity & access 

• Unique credentials per agent instance 
• Least privilege on all tools, APIs and storage layers 
• Expiry-based tokens, session isolation, permission tiering 

2. Prompt & output governance 

• Log all prompts, completions and model IDs 
• Annotate sensitive fields (e.g., PII, PHI, financial identifiers) 
• Pre-filter and post-filter for jailbreaks, hallucinations, policy noncompliance 

3. Memory & context control 

• TTL (time-to-live) enforcement on memory 
• Session encryption, context obfuscation 
• Explicit boundary rules for cross-agent memory access 

4. Explainability infrastructure 

• Reasoning snapshots (e.g., decision cards, intermediate chains) 
• Annotated outputs with underlying logic, citations 
• Override logs with human-in-the-loop adjudication paths 

5. Monitoring & drift management 

• Validate model outputs in pre- and post-production 
• Alert on divergence from expected agent behavior 
• Use shadow deployments to observe agents in passive test mode 

Forward-looking organizations are pairing these controls with “AI kill switches,” model card attestations and even AI risk insurance.

Each focus area equips GRC leaders to harden agent operations while enabling scale and agility. 

From control to confidence

AI agents represent a paradigm shift. They are here to stay, and their value is clear. But so are the risks. The path forward lies not in slowing adoption, but in building the right governance muscle to keep pace. 

To enable responsible autonomy at scale, organizations must: 

• Treat agents as digital actors with identity, access and accountability 
• Architect traceability into workflows and decision logs 
• Monitor agent behavior continuously, not just during build or testing 
• Design GRC controls that are dynamic, explainable and embedded 
• Build human capabilities that complement, challenge and steer AI agents in real time 

AI agents won’t wait for policy to catch up. It’s our job to ensure the policy is where the agents are going. 

Organizations that lead in governance will earn: 

• Regulator trust, through explainable compliance 
• User trust, by embedding fairness and transparency 
• Executive trust, by proving automation can scale without compromise 

Security, risk and compliance teams now have the opportunity — and responsibility — to architect trust for the next era of enterprise automation.

This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.
Want to join?