Agentic Security & Governance

Insights

AI Agents are being developed to read and respond to emails on our behalf, chat on messaging apps, browse the internet, and even make purchases. This means that, with permission, they can access our financial accounts and personal information. When using such agents, we must be cognizant of the agent’s intent and the permissions we grant it to perform actions. When producing AI agents, we need to monitor for external threats that can sabotage them by injecting malicious prompts.

Prompt ≠ Purpose: Why Goal-Directed Behavior in Agentic AI Demands More Than Just Good Prompts

Insights

Imagine this: you ask a generative AI tool to “summarize last quarter’s procurement activity for compliance reporting.” Within seconds, it produces a well-structured summary, complete with headings and bullet points. So far, so good. Next, you instruct it to email the report to the compliance officer, attach the raw data for audit purposes, and log the interaction in your internal documentation system. Here’s where the system begins to falter. It doesn’t remember which procurement dataset it used in the first step. It requires you to re-specify the compliance officer’s details, the file format, the logging protocol, and the context all over again.