Treat AI agents like eager but misguided interns

AI agents are moving beyond chatbots into digital workers that can act on applications and data, and that shift brings new security and governance concerns. Panelists at the Snowflake Summit urged treating these agents like eager but misguided human interns — requiring close oversight, clear instructions, and active human management.

Restraint, context and intent must be built into agent development. "You may tell the agent to buy you shoes, and before you know it, it has bought you a car," said Mayank Agarwal. Nancy Wang added that "it's not just enough to know what this agent was created to do.

You also have to know things like whose authority it is acting under and what it's going to do, for example, with data it's accessing." Developers should discard old assumptions about predictable integrations. Agarwal warned that, unlike the past when API flows were explicit, "in the agentic world, it's completely unpredictable.

ai agents, digital workers, chatbots, security, governance, human oversight, snowflake summit, mayank agarwal, nancy wang, data access