The 5 Core Requirements for Selling AI Agents into the Enterprise
I've talked to dozens of enterprise security leaders about AI agents. Here’s what you need to do to help them turn on your product.
I’ve spent the last several months talking to dozens of CISOs, GRC officers, General Counsels, and AI leaders to understand what’s holding back faster enterprise adoption of AI agents.
A clear pattern emerged. These enterprise leaders are not trying to be the "department of no." They are under immense pressure to deploy AI for a competitive edge. But they are also accountable for a new, poorly understood category of risk. They want to say yes to innovative AI products, but they can’t turn them on without the evidence to prove they are acting with due diligence.
The challenge is that agents are a new type of software that creates a fundamental architectural mismatch between how agents operate and how we secure and control other applications. Our existing enterprise security stack was built for a world that is host-centric, user-centric, and exfiltration-centric. Agents defy these assumptions, creating a new class of risk that current tools can’t manage. Enterprise leaders want to innovate, but they need partners who understand this new reality and can provide the necessary proof of safety and control.
Based on my conversations, here is my interpretation of the 5 core requirements companies seeking to sell agents into enterprises must meet to help these security and compliance leaders get to “yes.” By understanding their world and coming prepared, you not only accelerate your sales cycle—you make their lives easier and become a trusted partner in the process.
1. The Attribution Requirement: Prove It Was the Agent
The first requirement is to solve the attribution problem. When your agent acts on a user's behalf, standard audit logs attribute all actions to the human user. This creates an accountability nightmare and an unacceptable compliance gap.
For a GRC leader, an unreliable audit trail is a critical failure for frameworks like SOC 2, NIST AI RMF, GDPR, and ISO 42001. It becomes impossible to prove that security controls are being enforced if you can’t distinguish between a user's deliberate choice and an agent's autonomous action. From a legal standpoint, this attribution gap creates an unacceptable liability. This is especially challenging with collaborative agents like co-pilots, where agent actions are so deeply intertwined with a user's live session that separating their activities in a log file is nearly impossible.
To meet this requirement, your product must provide a way to create a distinct, governable identity for every agent. The system must produce an immutable record that clearly separates the actions of an employee from the autonomous actions of an agent using their credentials.
2. The Containment Requirement: Prove What It Can't Do
The second requirement is to provide robust containment. We must assume that agents can be hijacked or suffer from agentic misalignment–—behaving in unexpected, harmful ways to achieve a goal. This creates a new form of insider threat where a trusted, well-intentioned agent becomes the risk.
The CISO’s accountability extends to preventing catastrophic risk inside the corporate perimeter–a place traditional security tools can’t often see. This risk of internal misuse, like corrupting or deleting data—leading to potential operational disruption or financial misstatement—is most acute with asynchronous agents, which can perform complex tasks in the background without direct human supervision.
To satisfy the CISO, you must demonstrate enforceable guardrails that apply the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) not just to the user, but directly to the agent's behavior. This requires a mechanism to govern the specific tools and actions an agent can use, independent of the user's own permissions.
3. The Evidence Requirement: Provide an Immutable Record for Forensics
The third requirement is to supply forensic-quality evidence. When an incident occurs or an auditor calls, enterprise buyers need more than a simple log of API calls; they need a complete, tamper-proof record of exactly what your agent did, what it saw, what decisions it made, and why. This full record is the agent's trajectory.
A SecOps team cannot determine the blast radius or remediate a threat without this complete narrative. For a compliance team, this same immutable record—a secure trajectory —is the required proof of due diligence for auditors. To meet this need, you must provide a secure, chronological, and immutable record of the agent's entire journey through the customer's environment.
4. The Translation Requirement: Map Your Product to Your Customer's Risk Frameworks
Answering the first three requirements provides the foundational capabilities. To get enterprise-ready, you must translate your technical solution into the language of enterprise risk and compliance.
GRC teams are resource-constrained and can’t be expected to reverse-engineer the risks your agent introduces. They need you to come prepared with a risk assessment mapped to frameworks like the NIST AI RMF. You must be able to articulate how your agent impacts regulations like GDPR, what specific risks it creates around sensitive data like PII, and how you help them manage complex liabilities like IP infringement, data residency, and the potential for algorithmic bias.
Furthermore, every enterprise has a unique risk appetite. CISOs require the ability to implement their own specific policies. To meet this need, you must provide granular, configurable controls that allow customers to tailor the agent’s behavior to the customer’s environment. A product that operates as an unconfigurable black box is a non-starter.
5. The Proving Ground Requirement: Show You've Done Your Homework
Finally, enterprise buyers expect you to know your agents better than they do. This means they need you to proactively identify and mitigate your agent's risks before it ever touches their environment. Your agent needs to come stress-tested against realistic threats and complex scenarios.
Customers do not want their organization to be your testing lab. Meeting this requirement means demonstrating that you have a rigorous process for uncovering vulnerabilities in your own agent before your customers do. This capability is key for their third-party risk management programs and builds the confidence they need to move forward.
From Vendor to Partner: Solving the Mismatch
The leaders I spoke with are looking for partners who understand the depth of this architectural shift.
By building your product to meet these five requirements, you demonstrate that you're not just selling a feature; you're providing a solution to the fundamental mismatch between the agentic world and the traditional enterprise. You show that you respect their need for control, compliance, and provable safety.
Doing this work upfront not only shortens your sales cycle and helps you stay ahead of competition, but also positions you to become a trusted partner who is truly enabling your customer’s new wave of enterprise innovation.