The AI employees are already on the floor. Is anyone watching?

Agentic AI can deliver meaningful operational gains quickly, but the article argues that the real challenge for CIOs is not deployment—it is day-to-day governance, where model drift, stale data, and unclear accountability can silently create business risk. For IT organizations, this means moving beyond policy and steering committees to operational controls: calibrated tolerance limits, human-in-the-loop workflows, continuous monitoring, and shared ownership across technology, operations, legal, and risk. Strategically, leaders should treat AI agents like employees that require onboarding, escalation paths, and performance management, or risk costly failures and project cancellations as adoption scales.