Agents expose the limitations of trust

Enterprise computing has long depended on chains of trust. Organizations trust their cloud providers, software vendors, identity systems and administrators to operate as designed. That model has worked because humans have remained the ultimate decision-makers. Agentic artificial intelligence changes that equation. Autonomous systems can retrieve information, make decisions, invoke external tools, collaborate with other agents and execute actions on behalf of the enterprise. As organizations delegate more authority to intelligent systems, they also need a way to determine whether those systems behave as intended. The question is no longer simply whether AI can perform complex work. It is whether every consequential action can be independently examined and verified. The next era of enterprise computing will be defined not only by what autonomous systems can do, but by whether organizations can reconstruct and verify what they have done. An AI agent may retrieve information from…