From employee to AI agent: the new insider risks that make CISOs lose sleep

A cop who does not issue fines, but can get them: does he exist? In 2026, yes. That's exactly how you can see an AI officer: as a police officer with full powers, but without training or judgment.

To be clear: an AI agent can help your organization very well. Most have already figured this out: according to Microsoft, more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies are now actively running AI agents in production environments.

The risks arise mainly because people do not always realize that AI agents act with authority without understanding what they are doing. What employees mainly see is that the world is changing rapidly and many tasks are easier to perform. AI does not represent technology, but a completely new way of working. Simplicity is central to this. Reports that you used to create in a few weeks can now be created in less than a minute. People understandably want to experiment with that.

The question is no longer whether AI will have an impact on your employees and organization. The question is whether you, as a CISO, keep a grip on the impact of AI.

Larger scale, (much) greater risks

In the past, anyone who made a mistake did so manually. Such a mistake could often be corrected fairly quickly.

With AI, the cards have changed. An AI agent is a very smart assistant that offers the employee a lot of value by thinking quickly. This also means that you can make mistakes very quickly if you have no control over them. You make those mistakes on a much larger scale than before. And its size is difficult to estimate, because the 'reach' of AI is much greater. If you press one wrong button, sensitive business data can literally 'go around the world'.

Many organizations are currently in a phase similar to the time when the internet emerged. People are experimenting with AI without clear frameworks or strategy. This entails several risks that CISOs lose sleep to. For example:

• Data breaches
  Employees use all kinds of AI tools to increase their productivity. They can put sensitive data in there that should not be shared.
   
• Non-compliance
  Many organizations have a policy around storing company data within a certain region, such as the EU. If employees use AI tools hosted outside of it, they are (without realizing it) not complying with these policies.
   
• Lack of control
  As a CISO, you want to know where your data is stored and used. Shadow AI makes it practically impossible to maintain control and overview.

How do you stay in control?

It is clear that things need to change. But how?

The best first step you can take is to get your data and everything around it in order. Determine who has what rights and make conscious choices in this regard. In addition, make sure that security is properly set up from the start. Logging, monitoring and detection play an important role in this: they provide insight into your data inventory and deviant behavior of people and machines. It is precisely this insight that is essential to recognize and manage Insider Risk in a timely manner. Finally, make informed decisions about a select number of AI applications that employees are allowed to use.

By arranging all this before the implementation of data platforms and AI agents, you remain in control. Also (and especially!) in the bottom-up movement that characterizes AI. AI use comes from the employees. And that is a good development, but it is also all the more reason to steer everything in the right direction.

Explore what next steps you can take? Take a look at Managed Data Security and also read our blog about why the future of AI is multi-model . In it, we discuss the development towards a broader AI landscape, in which governance is not about one tool, but must be designed AI-wide.