Are Organisations Ready to Hand Over the Keys to Agentic AI?
TL;DR
The main finding is that agentic AI readiness is constrained not only by model performance but also by socio-technical governance gaps, including tool misuse, prompt injection, memory poisoning, privilege abuse, cascading failures and ineffective human review.
Abstract
Agentic artificial intelligence represents a significant shift in organisational AI because such systems can interpret goals, plan multi-step workflows, use tools, access data, and execute actions with varying levels of autonomy. This policy paper examines whether organisations are ready to “hand over the keys” to these systems. It argues that the answer is conditional and domain-specific: many organisations are ready to use agentic AI as a supervised assistant in bounded, low-risk and reversible workflows, but most are not ready to delegate broad discretionary authority in high-stakes contexts. Drawing on supplied source materials and recent research on reliability, governance, risk alignment, oversight, security, AI management systems, and enterprise adoption, the paper develops a six-dimensional readiness model that covers technical reliability, authority and identity, data and tool governance, human oversight, accountability, and workforce legitimacy. The main finding is that agentic AI readiness is constrained not only by model performance but also by socio-technical governance gaps, including tool misuse, prompt injection, memory poisoning, privilege abuse, cascading failures and ineffective human review. The paper concludes that organisations should adopt staged delegation, maintain agent registries, assign unique agent identities, apply least privilege, red-team agentic workflows, formalise oversight and prohibit high-stakes autonomy until assurance evidence is substantially stronger.