Governing Agentic AI

For the last several years, "AI risk" has been a catch-all line item on risk registers — a placeholder for everything from model bias to data privacy to vendor concentration. That catch-all is no longer good enough. Agentic AI — systems that don't just generate a recommendation but take autonomous action on it, executing transactions, modifying records, triggering workflows, and interacting with other systems without a human clicking "approve" at every step — has emerged as its own distinct risk category for 2026. Operations and internal audit leaders who are still filing it under the generic "AI risk" bucket are already behind.