Are AI agents ready to work without human oversight?

Happy Thursday, and welcome to EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation! There are just nine days left before Halloween, enough time to stream the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead, the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the second-creepiest film Donald Sutherland ever made), and the original 1981 The Evil Dead. Notice a theme? Now, let’s get going.

When can AI agents take over tasks on their own? And what are the benefits and the dangers when they do? That’s one of the questions bedeviling executives now as AI agents are becoming better than human employees at many tasks even as the legal and regulatory rules that would govern them flying solo are still mostly unwritten.

Taking the leap: Nils Bachtler (LinkedIn), co-founder and CEO of the Egyptian fintech Klivvr, is at one end of the spectrum. Klivvr is expecting “in the very near future” to allow AI agents to make decisions without human approval about underwriting loans and following up on late payments, Bachtler said during the Enterprise Egypt Forum earlier this month.

But what if…? Asked about the dangers of putting machines in charge, Bachtler made two separate cases.

• The value to the company of making AI independent in some areas is greater than the risk of a screwup.
• Putting these decisions in the hands of humans has its own drawbacks — arguably more of them. “When you hire someone, for example a risk officer or a credit officer, he comes with a past experience from a different time, from a different institution. The world in general is evolving … faster than people can cope with,” he said.

The wait-and-see approach: Khalil El Bawab (LinkedIn), CEO for local and regional markets at the investment bank Beltone Holding, isn’t ready to take humans out of the loop. He described a more cautious approach. “We trust [AI] in the collection of data at this point in time. We trust it in making suggestions, but do we trust it in deciding? Not at this moment in time, not in our line of business,” he said, speaking on a separate panel at the forum.

One big reason to be hesitant: AI agents may do the work far faster and get it right more often than humans at this point. But, when they go off the rails, there’s a good chance that they’ll do so more spectacularly than the average well-intentioned human ever would — as evidenced by the steady stream of stories about AI agents going rogue and hacking innocent victims.

The human holding the bag: “In case, God forbid, litigation [starts], who’s going to be sued? It’s the managing director or the CEO of the company, not the machine,” El Bawab said.

But, remember: We’re (probably) still in the very early days of the AI revolution. Agents’ capabilities will get far better. Their decisionmaking will grow more nuanced. Governments may even develop guardrails that give companies more confidence handing some decisionmaking over to AI. Ultimately, the balancing act we’re talking about above may come to sound quaint.

There’s a lot more from our Egypt Forum in Forum Playback. It’s online here and will be arriving in your inbox every week for the next seven weeks.

Now, let’s get to today’s Lede, which looks at the physical threats to Gulf data centers and the Western partners that haven’t been scared away — so far.