When your AI agent can send emails, move money, and modify databases, the security conversation changes completely. Traditional cybersecurity was built around protecting systems from external threats. Agentic AI introduces a new category: securing systems that act on their own.
This isn't a future problem. It's happening now. And the industry is scrambling to catch up.
Agents aren't users. They're actors.
A chatbot reads your question and suggests an answer. A human reviews it, maybe edits it, and sends it. The human is the actor. The AI is a tool.
An AI agent is different. It receives a goal, plans a sequence of actions, executes them across multiple systems, and makes decisions at each step. It might query a database, call an API, draft a document, send it to a customer, and log the interaction in your CRM - all without a human touching anything.
That's powerful. It's also a fundamentally different security surface. Every action the agent takes is a potential point of failure, a potential policy violation, or a potential attack vector.
NVIDIA and Trend Micro are already building the solution layer
In March 2026, Trend Micro (rebranded as TrendAI) announced expanded collaboration with NVIDIA to support OpenShell, NVIDIA's new open-source runtime for agentic AI. The solution is designed to let organisations deploy autonomous AI agents with security baked in from the start, not bolted on afterwards.
This is significant because it signals that the major infrastructure players recognise agent security as a first-class concern, not an afterthought. When NVIDIA builds security into its agent runtime, the entire ecosystem follows.
The three pillars of agent security
1. Identity and access control. Agents need credentials to do their work. They need API keys, database access, email sending permissions. Managing those credentials - rotating them, limiting their scope, revoking them instantly when needed - is the foundation. An agent should only ever have access to the minimum set of resources it needs for its current task.
2. Action monitoring and audit trails. Every action an agent takes should be logged, timestamped, and attributable. If an agent sends an email to a customer, there should be a complete record of why it decided to send it, what data it used, and what the content was. This isn't just for security - it's essential for compliance, debugging, and trust.
3. Guardrails and kill switches. Agents need boundaries. Hard limits on what they can and can't do, what amounts they can approve, which systems they can write to. And when an agent behaves unexpectedly, there needs to be an immediate way to stop it. Gartner identifies the lack of these controls as a primary reason for the projected 40% failure rate in agentic AI projects.
The human-in-the-loop question
The most debated question in agent security is where to put the human. Too much oversight defeats the purpose of automation. Too little creates unacceptable risk.
The emerging consensus is tiered autonomy. Low-risk, high-frequency tasks (scheduling meetings, summarising documents, updating CRM records) run fully autonomously. Medium-risk tasks (sending external emails, generating reports) require spot-check review. High-risk tasks (financial transactions, contract modifications, data deletions) require explicit human approval.
The companies getting this right are the ones that map their risk tolerance before they deploy, not after something goes wrong.
Why this matters for every business evaluating AI agents
If you're a CTO or Head of AI evaluating agent solutions, security should be your first question, not your last. Specifically:
- How does the agent authenticate with external systems?
- What logging and audit capabilities exist?
- Can you define and enforce action boundaries?
- Is there a kill switch?
- How is sensitive data handled in the agent's context?
- What happens when the agent encounters an edge case it wasn't trained for?
The vendors who can answer these questions clearly are the ones building production-grade solutions. The ones who can't are still building demos.
See security-first agent solutions at Agentic Expo
Agent security is one of the core themes at Agentic Expo 2027. Across three content stages and 130+ exhibitors, you'll find the platforms, frameworks, and governance tools that are making autonomous AI safe for enterprise deployment.
23-24 March 2027, Olympia London. The world's first B2B exhibition dedicated to market-ready AI agents.