534. Governance by Design, Not an Afterthought

<p>In this episode, Brad Hairston talks with Michael Fauscette, founder and chief analyst at Arion Research, who explains why most agentic AI pilots never make it to production, and how companies can get there by giving agents goals instead of scripts, redesigning workflows, and building governance in from the start.</p><p>.</p><p>What we talked about with Michael:</p><p>* A continuum of autonomy - what separates agentic AI from deterministic automation. An agent becomes a “coworker” when it can take a goal instead of a script, then plan, act and learn.</p><p>*The gap between pilots and production - many companies experiment, but few scale. They get stuck on integration, data, skills, cost, compliance and change management.</p><p>* Workflow redesign over agent drop-ins - humans quietly fix broken process steps that agents will repeat and compound at machine speed.</p><p>* Error tolerance by use case - a 5% error rate is a UX annoyance in a chatbot, but a compliance and financial exposure when an agent takes actions.</p><p>* The risk of a badly set goal - “keep the customer happy” can turn into 100 unauthorized refunds.</p><p>* Total cost of ownership at scale - a low-volume pilot’s costs tell you little about the production cost curve, and hidden change management and token costs pile up.</p><p>* Governance and orchestration designed in from the start - boundary conditions, plus human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop and human-in-the-lead oversight models.</p><p>* A metric for scaling - each new use case should get cheaper and faster to stand up than the last.</p><p>.</p><p>Visit us on our socials:🦾 Get started with SS&amp;C Blue Prism: <a href="https://okt.to/JcMLdU" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://okt.to/JcMLdU</a>🧑‍💻LinkedIn: <a href="https://okt.to/k8zIdp" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://okt.to/k8zIdp</a>✖️Twitter: <a href="https://okt.to/fHyd9G" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://okt.to/fHyd9G</a>🙋‍♀️Facebook: <a href="https://okt.to/Vyjfiz" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://okt.to/Vyjfiz</a>📸Instagram: <a href="https://okt.to/5nYvIf" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://okt.to/5nYvIf</a>💭Blog: <a href="https://okt.to/QuGqVP" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://okt.to/QuGqVP</a>🤩Case studies: <a href="https://okt.to/ft1AMX" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">https://okt.to/ft1AMX</a>.</p><p>.</p><p>To ensure that you ne