Autonomy without oversight is a liability

As agents move from chatting to doing, organisations will demand controls that make AI actions predictable and reversible.

Article link: https://open.substack.com/pub/johanosteyn/p/autonomy-without-oversight-is-a-liability?r=73gqa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Audio summary: https://youtu.be/FN3uczaFygM

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For the last couple of years, most people have experienced AI as something that talks back. You ask a question, and it answers. You request a draft, and it produces text. But the next phase is different. AI is becoming agentic: not only generating words, but taking actions across calendars, email, documents, customer systems, and workflows.

In other words, it moves from conversation to execution. That sounds like a dream until you remember a simple truth about any system that acts: mistakes become expensive. A chatbot that gets something wrong can be corrected. An agent that sends the wrong message, changes the wrong record, or books the wrong meeting has already created a real-world consequence. This is why autonomy without oversight is a liability.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

Every major technology shift moves through stages. First, we get novelty, then productivity, then dependency. With AI, the novelty stage was chat. The productivity stage is the flood of copilots embedded into everyday software. The dependency stage begins when AI is allowed to act on our behalf.

Agentic AI is not magic. It is a bundle of capabilities: it can interpret intent, break a task into steps, call tools or APIs, and then execute. In practice, this means a single instruction can trigger multiple systems. That is precisely what makes agents powerful, and also what makes them risky.

Organisations have been here before, just not with language. We learned the hard way that automation without controls leads to cascading errors, silent failures, and operational fragility. Agentic AI brings the same lesson into knowledge work.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

The core problem is not that AI will always be wrong. Humans are wrong, too. The problem is that agentic mistakes scale faster than human mistakes because they are faster, cheaper, and can be repeated consistently.

That changes the risk model. A human sending a poor email might annoy one client. An agent sending a poor email can annoy a hundred, because it can be instructed to “follow up with everyone” in seconds. A human misfiling a document is recoverable. An agent with broad access can misfile thousands, overwrite files, or leak sensitive information if guardrails are weak.

This is why the most important product feature in the agent era is not autonomy. It is adjustable autonomy. The agent must know when to ask, when to suggest, when to act, and when to stop. It must be interruptible and able to justify its actions. It must show what it is about to do before it does it, and it must make it easy to undo.

Oversight is also about identity and permission. An agent that acts on your behalf must not automatically inherit every permission you have. It should operate with least privilege, escalating only when needed. In the same way you would not give a junior employee full access to finance systems on day one, you should not give an agent unlimited access simply because it speaks fluently.

There is a deeper organisational issue too: people will over-trust agents if the interface feels confident. Voice and human-like interaction increase that risk. A system that sounds certain can still be wrong. Good oversight design compensates for human psychology by forcing checkpoints where it matters most.

IMPLICATIONS

For business leaders, the practical move is to treat agents as a new class of operational risk. Before deployment, insist on an inventory of what the agent can access and what actions it can take. Build clear approval thresholds: what it may do automatically, what requires review, and what is prohibited. If the answer is “it can do anything”, you are building a future incident.

For product teams and vendors, “show your work” should not be optional. Agents must provide logs, audit trails, and clear explanations of actions and sources. They should make reversibility easy, with a clear record of what changed and how to roll it back. The best agent products will look less like magic and more like controlled delegation.

For individuals, the new skill is supervision. You will not only do work; you will direct it, check it, and sign off on it. That requires judgment and discipline, not merely good prompting. The value shifts from typing to deciding.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

Agentic AI will reshape work far more than chatbots ever did, because it touches action, not just information. But the organisations that succeed will not be the ones that chase maximum autonomy. They will be the ones who design for safe delegation: limited permissions, clear checkpoints, transparency, and the ability to stop and reverse. 

Autonomy without oversight is not innovation. It is irresponsibility at scale. If we get the control layer right, agents can be transformative. If we get it wrong, we will spend the next few years cleaning up automated messes that should never have been allowed to happen.

Author Bio: Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net