Governance isn't optional once AI touches production

It's easy to treat governance as paperwork you add after the interesting engineering work is done. That's backwards — the moment an agent can take an action on your systems, governance is the engineering work.

At minimum, that means knowing what every agent is allowed to touch, logging what it actually did, and having a real-time way to notice when it's behaving outside its expected bounds — before a customer or regulator notices first.

Cost control belongs in the same bucket. An ungoverned agent fleet can quietly turn into an unpredictable line item as usage scales, which is its own kind of production incident.

None of this needs to slow you down if it's built in from the start. It only becomes expensive when it's retrofitted after something's gone wrong.