The questions to ask before you deploy an AI agent

What we're tracking

• •Trust is the thing that decides whether an agent gets used The most useful piece of the day is a survey, not a product. Intercom asked more than a thousand end users how they feel about dealing with AI agents, how capable they think those agents are, and how much they trust them [1]. That framing is worth sitting with, because it names the real barrier to adoption.
• •Your tools now have users that are not people For years, access control assumed every actor was a person with a login. That assumption is breaking. An agent holds credentials, reaches into systems, and reads or changes data on its own schedule. It is a user, but not a human one.
• •Governance is another word for knowing who is accountable Zapier published a piece on AI governance, and its framing is the practical one. When something goes wrong — a corrupted record, an unauthorised action, a decision made on your behalf that you never approved — someone has to be accountable [3]. Governance is the set of rules and records that make that accountability possible before the incident, not after.
• •Being able to choose the model is a form of control Notion shipped a feature that points at a larger principle: you can now control which AI models your agents use [4]. On the surface that reads as an administrator preference. Underneath, it is about control over cost, capability, and where your data goes.
• •Finance is the next function to get agents Salesforce released a CFO Priorities Report, based on a double-blind survey of 865 finance leaders across three continents, which finds the role in the middle of a shift [5]. Finance has been slower to hand work to software than sales or support, for good reason: the cost of an error is measured in money and in regulators. That it is now the subject of an agent story tells you how far the pattern has spread.
• •The through-line for a buyer Read together, the day says something simple. Agents are no longer the hard part. The hard part is the surrounding structure: the trust that gets them used, the access controls that keep them safe, the governance that assigns accountability, the model choices that keep costs and data in hand, and the oversight that keeps a person answerable for the outcome.