World Model Readiness When software acts in your name

Module · When software acts in your name

The Agentic AI Readiness Check

An agent is not a chatbot: it does not answer, it acts. It sends the email, moves the money, books the travel, changes the record, all with your credentials and without waiting to be asked twice. The capability is real and the guardrails usually are not. This module checks the five that decide whether autonomy is an asset or a liability: permission boundaries, spend limits, audit trails, human checkpoints, and a kill switch that works.

Question 1 of 5 · Boundaries are explicit

Do your agents have explicit boundaries on what they are allowed to do?

An agent with your credentials can do anything you can do unless something stops it: send mail, change records, move money, book travel. Boundaries defined as scoped permissions, enforced by the system, are the difference between a tool and a loaded liability.

Question 2 of 5 · Spend is capped hard

Can your agents spend money, and if so what actually stops them overspending?

Agents that book, buy or transact need hard limits enforced by the payment system, not soft ones suggested in a prompt. A loop bug or an injected instruction should hit a wall, not a polite reminder. The first runaway agent is an expensive way to learn this.

Question 3 of 5 · Every action is logged

For every action an agent takes, can you reconstruct what it did and why?

When an agent acts in your name you need the full chain: the trigger, the reasoning, the action, the result. Without an immutable log you cannot debug a failure, dispute a charge or defend a decision. 'The AI did it' is not an audit trail.

Question 4 of 5 · Humans gate key actions

Are there actions your agents cannot complete without a human saying yes?

Autonomy is a dial, not a switch. High-stakes or irreversible actions, large payments, external messages, data deletion, should pause for human approval. Which actions those are is a governance choice you make deliberately, or one that gets made for you by omission.

Question 5 of 5 · Kill switch is tested

If an agent starts doing damage right now, can you stop it in seconds?

Every autonomous system needs a tested off switch that halts all agents fast, without waiting for a deploy. Untested kill switches fail exactly when they are needed. The question is not whether you have one, but whether you have ever actually pulled it.

For the statistics · one click each

Three questions for the public picture

These do not affect your score. They feed the anonymised, aggregated statistics; groups under 8 respondents are never shown.

How far have autonomous AI agents gone in your company?

None
Exploring
Human always in the loop
Acting autonomously
Scaled across processes

Can any of your agents spend money or transact without human approval?

No
Up to a small limit
Only with approval
Yes, unsupervised
No agents yet

Do you have a tested way to stop all agents immediately?

No
Yes, but untested
Yes, tested
Tested regularly
No agents yet

Your context

Used to calibrate the report. Company size and sector remain in the anonymized dataset; your email does not.