Curated from Latest from TechRadar US in News,opinion — Here’s what matters right now:
For business leaders right now, two small words seem almost impossible to avoid: AI agents. Built on the ‘brain’ of an AI model, and armed with a specific purpose and access to tools, agents are autonomous decision-makers that are being increasingly integrated into live business processes. Unlike normal AI tools , which rely on user prompts, agent-based – agentic – AI can execute tasks iteratively, making decisions that carry real business consequences, and real governance risk. In short, agents aren’t tools, they’re teammates. As well as sitting in an organization’s tech stack, they sit on its org chart. Marc Benioff, cofounder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, the $260 billion valued software giant, says that today’s CEOs will be the last to manage all-human workforces. (Asked if an agent could replace him some day, Benioff responded, half-joking, “I hope so.”) The sooner businesses recognize this shift, the faster they can move to securing and governing AI for accelerated innovation. Just as human workers come under the umbrella of human resources (HR) , it’s useful to think of agents as non-human resources (NHRs). Just like humans, there are costs to employing NHRs – including computing, architecture and security costs – and they need induction, training and appropriate limitations on what they can do, and how. This is especially true as these NHRs move up the value chain to perform high-skill tasks that once belonged to mid-senior level talent. For example, autonomous agents are actively managing supplier negotiations, handling payment terms, and even adjusting prices based on commodity and market shifts – functions typically handled by teams of trained analysts. Businesses can’t secure what they don't understand Introducing NHRs at the enterprise level is requiring an entire rethink of governance and security . That’s because existing cybersecurity focuses on managing human risk, internally and externally; it’s not built for the realities of always-on, self-directed agents that understand, think, and act at machine speed. Like the best employees , the most effective agents will have access to enterprise data and applications, from staffing information and sensitive financial data to proprietary product secrets. That access opens the organization up the risk of attacks from outside, as well as misuse from within. In 2024, the global average cost of a data breach was $4.9 million, a 10% jump on the previous year and the highest total ever – and that was before the introduction of agents. In the AI era, bad actors have new weapons at their disposal, from prompt injection attacks to data and model poisoning. Internally, a misaligned agent can trigger a cascade of failures, from corrupted analytics to regulatory breaches. When failures stem from internally-sanctioned AI, there may be no obvious attacker, just a compliant agent acting on flawed assumptions. In the age of agents, when actions are driven by non-deterministic models, unintentional be
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Original reporting: Latest from TechRadar US in News,opinion