Governance
How to govern your agent after launch
Launch is the beginning. An agent with no owner and no weekly review degrades quietly.
Ownership
Who owns what
Four roles. One person may hold more than one, but no role may be left empty.
Agent owner (one named person)
Approves changes, can pause the agent immediately, answers for its behaviour.
Knowledge owner
Keeps documents, prices and policies current; removes anything outdated.
Approver
Reviews the queue for refunds, payments, deletions and anything irreversible.
Escalation contact
Receives conversations the agent hands over, within a stated response time.
Monitoring
The signals worth watching
Five signals reveal most problems before a customer complains.
Handover rate
How often the agent escalates. A sudden rise usually means missing or stale knowledge.
Unanswered questions
Read the actual questions weekly — they are your knowledge backlog.
Approval queue age
Items waiting too long mean the approver is a bottleneck, not the agent.
Corrections after the fact
Every correction is a test case. Add it to your acceptance tests.
Volume by channel
Tells you where to expand next, and where the agent is not being used.
Permissions
Reviewing access
- A separate service account per integration, so it can be revoked without breaking the others.
- No write permission without a written reason and a named approver.
- A record of who granted access, when, and the next review date.
- Immediate removal when the task changes or a pilot ends.
Incidents
When the agent gets it wrong
- 1Pause the agent on the affected channel before debating the cause.
- 2Capture the conversation, the answer given and the source it used.
- 3Correct the underlying knowledge or rule, not just the single reply.
- 4Add the case to your acceptance tests so it cannot return silently.
- 5Tell the affected customer what happened if the answer reached them.
Cadence
Your governance routine
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