Teams adopting AI agents swing between two failures: agents that suggest but are never trusted, and agents that act while nobody is watching. Both come from one gap: no explicit rule for how much a system may finish alone. This session presents the Autonomy Index, a five-level scale for promoting work from human to agent with an evidence gate at each level, drawn from building a agentic system that automated life sciences commercialisation workflows and an ingestion agent in enterprise logistics.
Keytakeaways:
1. Map your team’s AI workflows onto the five-level Autonomy Index using strict reversibility and blast-radius tests.
2. Establish quantitative evidence gates to safely upgrade an agent from “human oversight required” to “autonomous execution authorized” using strict sample sizes and error tolerances.
3. Architect a deterministic handback protocol that safely shifts control back to a human operator the moment an agent encounters ambiguity or reaches its confidence limit.
4. Audit and quantify your team’s trust debt by isolating automated decisions that currently execute without a named, accountable human reviewer.
5. Upgrade your Agile Definition of Done for non-human contributors by enforcing strict data provenance, execution reversibility, and confidence-threshold criteria.
- Date:22/08/2026
- Time:11:10
- Event:Autonomy by Design: The Next Frontier of Adaptive Architecture in the Era of Agentic AI @Bengaluru
