Pillar 3
An AI agent doesn't just respond: it acts, across multiple steps, with or without human approval. It's the youngest topic in this space — and the one where the vocabulary is still messy.
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The difference from a plain chatbot: an AI agent can chain several actions (check a system, make a decision, trigger a task) without a human re-prompting it at every step. That puts it close to RPA-style automation, while differing in its ability to adapt to situations that weren't scripted in advance.
That autonomy raises a question almost nobody covers seriously today: how do you keep control over an agent that acts on its own? Guardrails, human approval on sensitive actions, decision traceability — this is a priority angle for this pillar, precisely because we haven't found it covered seriously elsewhere.
AI agents & agentic automation12 min read
An AI agent that can read your systems and act on them has a larger attack surface than a chatbot that only answers. This checklist turns OWASP, NIST, the EU AI Act and May 2026 joint government guidance into controls you can verify: what to restrict, what to log, who owns the agent and how to stop it.
AI agents & agentic automation11 min read
A customer service AI agent does more than answer questions: it acts in your order, billing or booking systems and hands the case to a person when it should. The evidence is mixed: one randomized field experiment found faster chats but lower customer ratings on the cases the AI handled, and documented deployments include errors and course corrections. This guide separates sourced results from vendor claims.
