Do you know what your AI agent can do on its own?

Abstract

Deploying agentic AI in regulated contexts requires knowing two things about a deployment: what the system can do—its agency—and how much it acts without human involvement— its autonomy. Though often treated independently, the two are coupled: at higher autonomy, human error correction is less available, so reliable operation requires constraining agency accordingly, and compliance rules reinforce this by mandating human involvement as the consequences of actions grow. Yet no established approach addresses them jointly as a design problem, leaving practitioners without a principled basis for deciding where oversight should sit and how errors can be caught before they propagate. We introduce a two-dimensional design space in which both dimensions are organised into five operational levels, making the coupling explicit and navigable, and we propose six architectural tactics—checkpoints, escalation, multi-agent delegation, tool provisioning, tool fencing, and write staging—for adjusting a deployment’s position within it. We ground the tactics in a public-sector document classification system, tracing a path from manual operation to near-full autonomy under realistic compliance constraints. Together they offer a shared vocabulary for compliance-aware agentic AI design in which responsibility, auditability, and reversibility are explicit design choices rather than retrofitted properties.