There's a lot of coverage of how AI agents are being built. Almost none of it covers how they're being governed, maintained, and operated once they're deployed.
I think the reason is that the tools and frameworks for that layer barely exist yet. But the job title is already appearing: AI Director, Director of AI, VP of AI, Head of Agentic Systems. These are real roles at mid-to-large organizations right now.
I've been thinking about what this job actually entails in 2026, and it seems like 5 different functions are colliding into one role:
Strategy: Which workflows should be agentic? What's the build-vs-buy decision on agent infrastructure?
Governance: What are agents authorized to do? How do you maintain human oversight without creating bottlenecks?
Config management: How do you ensure agent instructions are versioned, consistent, and auditable across dozens of deployments?
Performance management: How do you measure whether an agent is doing its job well, especially when "doing its job" means handling edge cases a human would have caught?
Team coordination: Agents are touching every team. Who owns the agents? IT? The business unit? A central AI team?
Has anyone here navigated this at scale? The people building the agents seem well-represented in these communities. Curious to hear from those managing them. Newsletter for people at this layer in the comments.
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