Modern IT Leadership Summit

Accountability, cost and control in the age of AI agents

A year ago, the question was sovereignty: where does our data live, and who can reach it? This year, agents reach into that data on their own: they plan, call tools, change production, run up the bill. That is not a tooling question: it is a management question.

We scaled generation, not verification. The bottleneck moved from writing code to reviewing, testing and deciding what “good” means. Measured end to end, gains are modest. On narrow tasks, they look spectacular.

At the Modern IT Leadership Summit, technology leaders discuss what agentic systems demand of your organisation:

• Where the bottleneck moved, and which number reached the board
• More code, not better software: debt, complexity, the bar leaders set
• Cheap tokens, expensive verification: where the money goes
• Security at machine speed: who controls agent access, and what happens when a model is switched off?
• Accountability: who owns the consequences when nobody can explain the change

There is no best practice here yet: expect disagreement, a show of hands, and a microphone to ask your questions to our panel.