175 scenarios in advance helps organisations identify controls before the agent ever sees production. Look at hardening the prompts and internal logic the agent relies on. Avoid building agents that are overly general or capable of improvising beyond their business intent. Introducing guardrails for how agents interpret instructions, reason through tasks and make decisions are critical for safe autonomy. Organisations should also test agents collaboratively across teams before going live. Involve AI developers, operations, business stakeholders and security teams. This crossfunctional testing helps uncover blind spots and ensures the agent performs safely across real-world use cases. Finally, monitor and retrain agents postlaunch. Behaviour can drift over time, even in systems without direct learning loops. Set up real-time monitoring and observability pipelines, performance thresholds, and retraining checkpoints. Treat agents like evolving operational systems, not static deployments. Developers, IT and OT leaders in industries like retail who partner with AI providers and design agentic AI with security and governance from day one will lead – not just in innovation, but also in trust and resilience. Seeking out AI partners who can provide industry trained ready-to-use AI agents delivers a faster return on investment and gives organisations the scope to develop and add more agents with the AI platform and tooling for creating, deploying, and maintaining agentic solution components across a product portfolio. This enables easy development of AI applications and solutions. Businesses should prioritise partners with industry knowledge and a track record of working closely with developers in order to discover what tools will be useful for a full end-to-end AI pipeline. This will support developers and software partners to collect data, train AI models and deploy across customer devices with an AI software development kit and pre-trained models. And AI APIs for cloud, hybrid and edge solutions will provide an easy-to-use ecosystem to integrate into any business application. Explore AI possibilities for your business and customers at: bit.ly/45WAdB5 Srikrishna Shankavaram is principal cybersecurity architect for the chief technology office at Zebra Technologies RETAIL & CG Photo: iStock/Kanizphoto
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