AI REALIZED SALON

Agent Controls and the Governance Gap

Connect governance policies to operating controls

This half-day salon brought together enterprise leaders responsible for
how AI agents behave.

Where should agents have autonomy? What evidence demonstrates
that they are operating within their authority? Who acts when something
goes wrong?

The event included three focused panels, presentations of in-market
solutions, and conversations with peers leading enterprise AI adoption.
We examined how to keep agents within scope, govern their interactions,
verify their actions, and sustain reliable performance as they take on more
responsibility.

October 6, 2026 | San Francisco | SF Tech Week

Download the Readout
Watch Videos Below

Sponsors

Opening Keynote by Adil Ajmal

A half-day salon for enterprise leaders responsible for how AI agents behave.

Three panels.

Six questions that matter in production.

The discussions follow the work from setting authority to observing behavior and maintaining reliable operations. Across all three panels, we’ll examine what control systems should do automatically, when humans need to act, and how to protect ongoing business processes during intervention.

Panel 1: Authority, Compliance, and Agent Interactions

A customer support agent, an engineering agent, and a sales agent may operate separately while sharing tools, data, and infrastructure. This panel examines how enterprises set boundaries for the combined environment, authorize requests between agents, and keep collaboration useful and within budget.

  • When agents exceed their authority, how do we detect and stop them?

  • How do independently deployed agent systems interact safely, maintain compliance, and stay within resource limits?

Topics include unauthorized objectives, escape attempts, requests and refusals between agents, incentives that encourage shortcuts, and tests that demonstrate containment.

Panel 2: Visibility, Evidence, and External Activity

An agent’s explanation is one part of the picture. Enterprise leaders also need evidence of what executed, what changed, and whose authority supported the action. This panel explores visibility across tools, vendors, and external services, including the signals that justify investigation or intervention.

  • How do we know whether our agents are using outside resources or attacking other organizations?

  • How do we know what agents are doing and verify what they did?

Topics include activity records, delegated work, external access, evidence protected from modification, supervisory agents, and the tradeoffs between detecting problems and interrupting valid work.

Autonomous systems need continuing attention as their data, tools, permissions, and business processes change. This panel examines how teams recognize deteriorating performance, decide when to refresh or reset an agent, and maintain essential operations while they investigate and recover.

  • What operating discipline sustains autonomous systems within scope?

  • How do we detect declining reliability in long-running agents?

Topics include accuracy, context and memory, review intervals, reset triggers, controlled updates, human intervention, and the evidence required before work resumes.

Panel 3: Sustaining Autonomy, Reliability, and Recovery

Panel 1: Authority, Compliance, and Agent Interactions

Panel 2: Visibility, Evidence, and External Activity

Panel 3: Sustaining Autonomy, Reliability, and Recovery

Startups presenting solutions available today

Christopher Caen headshot

Verifiable data provenance and auditable governance

Presented by Chris Caen, COO JLINC

Policy enforcement between agents and enterprise data

Presented by Rajesh Jaluka, Field CTO, Algedonic

Runtime security from prompt to tool call

Presented by
Bobby Gupta, Co-founder and CEO Votal AI

Monitoring and guardrails for agents in production.

Presented by
Buddy Brewer, VP of Product Fiddler AI

What you’ll take back to your team

Clearer decisions about autonomy. Examine where agents may act independently, where approval is needed, and how to enforce those boundaries across systems.

A practical view of available solutions. Hear how five companies address specific control, governance, and security problems through their products and enterprise examples.

Evidence to guide intervention. Identify what you need to see to verify agent activity, detect declining reliability, and decide when to intervene.

Connections with enterprise peers. Compare approaches with leaders responsible for AI deployment, security, governance, and business operations.

Register

Who attended

C-level, VP, and Director-level leaders responsible for deploying and operating enterprise AI, along with the governance, security, data, risk, and operations leaders accountable for how those systems behave.

The discussions drew on enterprise processes across functions, including customer support, sales, engineering, finance, and procurement. Startups an iInvestors interested in the enterprise AI control, governance, and security landscape were also in attendence .

Supported By

Thank you to our sponsors for supporting this exchange among enterprise AI leaders.

Event sponsor

Venue sponsor

Frequently asked questions

  • Agent Controls and the Governance Gap is a half-day AI Realized salon for executives who have AI agents running in production and are deciding how far to let them go. Three 40-minute panels of enterprise leaders carry the afternoon: detecting and stopping agents that exceed their authority, verifying what agents did and what evidence proves it, and the operating discipline that keeps autonomous systems reliable over time. Panelists from Databricks, Walmart, Betterworks, Backstory, Meta, Atos and Yellow.ai each bring one example from their own work, anonymized if they prefer. Between the panels, five companies with in-market solutions present for ten minutes each. The salon runs on Tuesday, October 6, 2026 in San Francisco during SF Tech Week, and it follows up on the conversations started at the June Governing Agents at Scale roundtable.

  • Tuesday, October 6, 2026, from 12:30 to 5:00 PM Pacific in San Francisco’s Embarcadero district. The program runs 1:00 to 4:30, with networking until 5:00. The salon is in person only. The exact address goes out with each confirmation, and attendees bring photo ID because the building has a security desk and admission is by name.

  • Attendance is complimentary and includes light lunch. AI Realized is volunteer run and this salon is underwritten by its sponsors JLINC and K&L Gates.

  • Agent Controls and the Governance Gap is built for C-level, VP and Director leaders responsible for AI systems in production, and for the governance, security, data, risk and operations leaders accountable for how those systems behave. That includes heads of engineering, product, platform, security, data and AI governance. Investors are welcome. Anyone unsure whether the salon fits their role can email info@airealizedsummit.com describing what they do, and AI Realized will answer directly.

  • We approve registrations because the seating is limited. The value of the event depends upon who is in the room, so we prioritize executives who are adopting agents since they will benefit the most. We will waitlist others and add them as space allows. If your plans change, please release your seat. The venue address comes with your confirmation.

  • A governance policy states what agents are allowed to do. An operating control determines what they are able to do: the credential that is issued or withheld, the record the agent cannot alter, the threshold that routes a decision to a person, the limit that stops work when resources run past what was authorized. Most enterprises have written the policy and are still building the controls, and closing that distance is the subject of the October 6 salon.

  • Seven enterprise leaders speak across three 40-minute panels:

    •     Vidhi Agrawal, Product Leader for AI and Enterprise SaaS at Databricks

    •     Vikram Godbole, Sr Director of Software Engineering at Walmart

    •     Maher Hanafi, SVP of Engineering at Betterworks

    •     Victor Chang, CIO, CISO and SVP Platforms at Backstory

    •     Vasanth Chandra, Enterprise AI Products for Trust, Risk and Safety at Meta

    •     Chris McClean, VP and Global Head of AI Governance and Responsible AI at Atos

    •     Madhav Chinta, CTO at Yellow.ai

    Each brings one example from their own work, anonymized if they prefer: what the agents were responsible for and what happened, how the team detected it, which controls they introduced and what evidence shows those controls work, and what the response cost the business. Vikram Godbole argues that most agent governance today is an instruction rather than a control, and that enforcement means the capability is unavailable until the conditions are met. Vidhi Agrawal brings a case where cost telemetry caught an agent operating exactly as designed and still outrunning the commercial envelope its customer had committed to.

  • Five companies present products that are in market today, ten minutes each with a customer example:

    •     Chris Caen, COO of JLINC, on verifiable records of data interactions and signed data contracts

    •     Ian Livingstone, CEO of Keycard, on agent identity and short-lived verified credentials

    •     Cheryl Kieliszewski, PhD, Chief Customer Officer of Algedonic AI, on policy enforcement between agents and enterprise data

    •     Bobby Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Votal AI, on runtime security from prompt to tool call

    •     Buddy Brewer, VP of Product at Fiddler AI, on monitoring and guardrails for agents in production

    Each company presents its own product, and AI Realized does not endorse or resell any of them.

  • AI Realized is a community of 1,500+ executives across 770+ companies leading AI adoption: C-level, VP-level and Director-level in engineering, product, marketing, finance, HR, operations, sales, success and support. Its mission is to help executives realize value from enterprise AI. Like AI adoption itself, the membership is cross-industry and cross-function. AI Realized runs events, a podcast and the AI Realized Now newsletter. Joining is free, and the community is volunteer run.