Enterprise AI agents are creating a dangerous blind spot for leaders, often making them accountable for the autonomous systems without enough visibility or control.
Tatyana Mamut, CEO of Wayfound, explained how a new category of independent "Guardian Agent" platforms can create an always-on, unbiased supervisory system.
Mamut described how creating a legally defensible audit trail and empowering business users can cut compliance violations (from 7.4% to 1%), unblock operational bottlenecks, and give leaders the confidence to scale AI.
Enterprises deploying artificial intelligence are creating a dangerous blind spot. AI agents now run core business functions, but the leaders accountable for them are flying blind, lacking the end-to-end visibility and control they would have over a human workforce. Existing evaluation tools only widen the gap. They are either too technical for business owners or too high-level to be meaningful. A critical supervision gap now sits squarely where accountability lies.
Tatyana Mamut, PhD, the Co-Founder and CEO of Wayfound, is tackling this problem head-on. A Silicon Valley veteran with a resume that includes leadership roles at AWS and Salesforce, her work has always focused on the intersection of technology and human behavior. From Mamut's perspective, the industry is overlooking the foundational layer required to scale AI responsibly.
“The solution lies with Guardian Agents to provide ongoing, always-on supervision, alerting, and improvement for the people ultimately responsible and accountable for their performance: the business owners,” Mamut says. Independence is non-negotiable, she explains.
For Mamut, the solution should be a standalone supervisor for two reasons: performance and governance. It must be an unbiased observer to manage multi-agent workflows—a distinct third party with "no skin in the game." But it also needs to provide a legally defensible audit trail.
Trust, but verify: Now a core board-level concern, independent oversight is essential to meeting fiduciary duties and aligns with Gartner's focus on AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (TRiSM). “Recent lawsuits involving companies like Air Canada show that there is a clear duty of care. An independent audit trail is needed to prove the company has not fallen down on its duty to monitor.”
The results are measurable already, Mamut continues. At Sauce Labs, for example, implementing a guardian agent cut guideline violations from 7.4% to just 1%.
Compliance at speed: But fulfilling this duty also requires organizational agility, Mamut says. “If business users have to call the technical team and get on their roadmap, that’s not being compliant. Giving business users the ability to directly write and edit evaluation criteria is what’s required to supervise AI agents at scale.”
But doesn't assessing 100% of an agent's actions risk a data deluge? In fact, Mamut says the opposite is true. The supervisor’s purpose is to filter information intelligently, solving the new bottlenecks AI creates, she explains. “An AI supervisor functions just like a great frontline supervisor. The point is to take work away from the human, surfacing only what truly needs their attention.”
Unblocking the new bottleneck: "We consistently hear that AI simply moves the bottleneck from doing the work to reviewing and approving it. For one large BPO customer, approval queues became so long that they started missing their SLAs. But because our supervisor flags and grades everything as red, yellow, or green, it tells the human exactly where to look for the issue."
The same principle is proving valuable in complex, multi-agent workflows, according to Mamut. Here, it's about enabling reliable execution with transparent accountability. “We work with a hedge fund that uses multiple agents to generate research reports. By having an AI supervisor watching everything, the company has much more confidence that the agents are working well. That confidence has sped up their processes and accelerated decision-making.”
Ultimately, a fundamental shift in technology is driving this new need for governance. Old, deterministic workflows were predictable but rigid, Mamut explains. But today’s reality is different. “The new world of orchestration is probabilistic, fluid, and adaptive. A new context makes governance and guardian agents essential." Without that supervisory layer, business owners are flying blind, she concludes. With it, they gain the confidence and control to support their digital workforces at scale.
