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AI adoption across industries is entering a new chapter. As generative AI becomes embedded in business operations, a more powerful and more complex wave is emerging: agentic AI. These systems do not merely  assist with discrete tasks, but they can autonomously execute multi-step processes, make decisions, and interact with enterprise tools across functions and sectors. For organizations navigating the shift raises a fundamentally different set of questions around governance, security, accountability, and operational resilience. The latest installment of our GC lunch series brought together legal and cybersecurity leaders from Sophos, Securonix, and RingCentral to examine how companies are preparing for this agentic era and the cross-sector challenges it presents. Here are the key takeaways.

What Are Agents, and Why Should GCs Care?

• Agentic AI is qualitatively different from a chatbot or a document review tool. Agents can take action by reasoning, planning, executing multi-step processes, accessing enterprise systems, and making decisions with varying degrees of autonomy. That distinction should get every GC’s attention fast.
• A conventional enterprise AI system might draft a contract clause when prompted. An agentic system might identify the need for a clause, draft it, route it for approval, and update a contract management system without a human initiating each step. The governance implications of that leap are profound.
• From a GC’s perspective, the defining characteristic of agents is autonomy. Autonomy, in a legal context, is inseparable from questions of authority, liability, and control. The law of agency may get tested in new and unexpected ways.

Where Agents Are in the Ecosystem

• The push to build, develop, and deploy agents is accelerating across multiple verticals, business units, and sectors. Organizations represented at the lunch series spanning cybersecurity platforms and cloud communications, are actively building and deploying agents within their product suites and internal operations.
• The maturity curve for agents is still early, but the trajectory is steep. The biggest technical developments driving the move toward agentic systems are happening now, and panelists expect agents to show up most prominently across the enterprise in the next twelve to twenty-four months.
• The ecosystem is not settling on a single model. The conversation is moving between single-purpose agents, multi-agent systems, and orchestration layers. GC’s need to understand these architectural choices because each carries different risk profiles.
• Cybersecurity companies like Sophos and Securonix are playing a dual role: both shaping the agentic ecosystem as builders and serving as frontline defenders against the risks agents introduce. The message from the panel was clear – separate the hype from what is durable, and make sure your legal team is tracking the developments that most companies probably aren’t.

Agents Are Creating a New Governance Conversation

• The global legal landscape around AI is fluid, and agents are creating governance challenges that are materially different than those posed by standalone generative AI systems. GC’s cannot simply extend existing AI policies to cover agentic deployments because the risk profile is different in kind, not just degree.
• Autonomy and Accountability. Organizations must define the scope of authority granted to an agent with the same rigor they apply to human delegation. “Least privilege” takes on new meaning in the context of agents, and decision rights need to be documented when agents are used in critical workflows. The harder question of how much discretion an agent should have before mandatory human escalation is required has no one-size-fits-all answer, but it demands a deliberate framework.
• Security. Agents introduce security risks that are unique or heightened compared to non-agentic systems. Prompt injection, tool abuse, privilege escalation, and memory poisoning all take on new dimensions in an agentic environment. Agents are, in effect, creating a new attack surface inside the enterprise and CISOs are thinking carefully about how to monitor and contain these risks. General counsel should be part of that conversation, not waiting for an incident to force it.
• Data Privacy and Additional Risks. Agents complicate existing data governance and privacy frameworks in ways that many organizations have not yet anticipated. For companies navigating the complicated global patchwork of data privacy laws, deploying agents without a clear understanding of how they interact with personal data, cross-border transfers, and regulatory obligations can present significant challenges.  
• Third-Party Risk. Contracting with agentic vendors requires a different lens. Indemnity, limitation of liability, and security provisions all need to evolve for agentic AI.

What GCs Should Take Back to Their Teams

• The panelists were candid about what excites them about the agentic future but equally candid about the governance it demands. The right balance between innovation and governance must remain dynamic, requiring an ongoing negotiation that requires engagement from legal leadership.
• GCs need to be positioned to answer a key question – if you had to explain an agent’s conduct to a regulator, a court, or your board, what documentation would you need and how much of it does your organization actually have today?
• The one thing every legal leader in the room was urged to take back to their teams and their boards was that securing the agentic future is not a technology challenge alone. It is a governance, risk management, and leadership challenge as well.  

Agentic AI is moving from concept to deployment faster than most legal departments are prepared for. The GC’s who pair early engagement with deliberate governance frameworks and who define authority, demand auditability, and insist on security by design will be the ones who lead their organizations through this transition rather than react to it.

for a timely Wall Street Journal read echoing many of the points we addressed. Onwards!