On May 1, 2026, six cybersecurity agencies (CISA, NSA, ASD ACSC, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, NZ NCSC, and UK NCSC) published joint guidance on the careful adoption of agentic AI services. Most headlines treated it as a security advisory. The deeper signal: agentic AI has become a corporate governance problem, and almost no enterprise has the operating discipline to answer it.

This session explores 'bounded autonomy' as the governance posture that lets enterprises actually deploy agentic AI without losing control. Drawing on the speaker's 15-plus years across regulated industries and her tenure as Chief Compliance Officer at a publicly traded payments technology company, the session diagnoses why most current approaches fall into a false binary: deploy with minimal guardrails and hope nothing breaks, or ban agentic AI entirely and watch competitors move.

Bounded autonomy is a third path. It treats agentic AI as advisory by design, with structurally enforced limits on AI authority and human decisions on anything material. The architecture: advisory by default, escalation to humans on material decisions, reversibility designed in, audit trail produced continuously. Most current 'guardrails' approaches fail because they treat autonomy as a slider rather than an architecture.

Specific topics covered:

The Five Eyes' five named risk categories (privilege, design and configuration, behaviour, structural, accountability) and how to operationalize each.
The four-phase governance pattern the guidance recommends and where enterprises typically break it.
Defensibility design: how to produce the evidence trail that survives examination after an agentic incident.
The 'advisory by design' architecture for agentic systems that recommend but do not act unilaterally.
Where bounded autonomy fits in the broader AI governance lifecycle (discovery, development, deployment, monitoring, incident response, decommissioning).

Learning objectives:

Apply the Five Eyes guidance to enterprise agentic AI programs.
Distinguish bounded autonomy from generic 'AI safety' frameworks.
Design defensibility into agentic AI deployments before they ship, not after.
Operationalize advisory-by-design as a structural posture, not a checklist.

The session is grounded in the speaker's published commentary 'Bounded Autonomy' (May 2026) and the operational frameworks she has developed for agentic AI governance. Practitioner-derived frameworks, broadly applicable.
For organizers: panel placement welcome.