The Agent Harness: Shipping Autonomous AI Without Losing Control

About this session

As AI agents gain the ability to reason, plan, and take action, autonomy becomes both their greatest strength and their greatest risk. This talk explores the control infrastructure that sits between an agent's decisions and the actions it takes, enabling teams to safely deploy autonomous systems in production. The talk will cover governance mechanisms such as authorization, human-in-the-loop approvals, and runtime steering, followed by techniques for validating agent behavior through evaluations and red teaming. It will also examine the operational foundations required for real-world deployment, including observability, containment, and durability. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for building agents that can act independently while remaining predictable, auditable, and trustworthy.