Enterprise AI Agent Governance Checklist

AI agents need governance before they need more autonomy.

Use this checklist to evaluate whether an AI agent is ready to operate inside an enterprise workflow.

1. Ownership

• Who owns the agent?
• Who approves changes?
• Who reviews performance?
• Who is accountable if something goes wrong?

2. Purpose

• What business problem does the agent solve?
• What workflows does it support?
• What is explicitly out of scope?
• What does success look like?

3. Identity

• Does the agent have a unique identity?
• Is that identity tied to a human owner or team?
• Is the agent lifecycle managed?
• Can the agent be disabled quickly?

4. Data access

• What data can the agent access?
• Is the access necessary?
• Is sensitive data restricted?
• Are access patterns logged?

5. Tool access

• What tools can the agent call?
• What systems can it update?
• What actions are read-only?
• What actions change records, send messages, or trigger workflows?

6. Permissions

• Does the agent use least privilege?
• Are permissions reviewed regularly?
• Are permissions different by environment?
• Are elevated permissions time-bound?

7. Human approval

• Which actions require human approval?
• Which actions are advisory only?
• Which actions can happen automatically?
• Which actions are prohibited?

8. Evidence and audit

• Are prompts, context, tool calls, outputs, and approvals logged?
• Can a human reconstruct why the agent acted?
• Are logs retained long enough?
• Are audit records accessible to security and compliance teams?

9. Quality and evaluation

• How is output quality measured?
• What failure modes are tracked?
• What examples are used for evaluation?
• Who reviews drift or degradation?

10. Rollback and incident response

• Can the agent be stopped quickly?
• Can actions be reversed?
• Is there an incident response owner?
• Is there a playbook for harmful, incorrect, or unauthorized actions?

11. Cost and latency

• What does the agent cost to run?
• What latency is acceptable?
• Are spikes monitored?
• Are usage limits defined?

12. Readiness decision

Before increasing autonomy, answer this:

Do we have enough evidence, observability, approval control, and rollback ability to trust this agent with more responsibility?

If the answer is no, keep the agent in assist, prepare, or recommend mode.

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