AI agents are moving from advisory copilots to operational actors capable of calling APIs, changing infrastructure, triggering workflows and making decisions across production environments. Once that happens, the central reliability question is no longer simply whether the model produces a good answer, but who authorized the agent to act, under which identity, with what scope, and how that authority can be observed, constrained and revoked. This session examines the production architecture required for autonomous operations: non-human identity lifecycle and explicit ownership, delegated authorization and least privilege across tools and services, trust boundaries outside the model layer, auditable action trails, human escalation paths, deterministic safety gates and circuit breakers. We will also look at failure containment: what happens when an agent performs a technically valid action that is operationally wrong, and how SRE teams can limit blast radius before autonomy becomes systemic risk. The goal is a practical, product-independent framework for increasing useful autonomy without allowing operational, security and economic risk to increase at the same rate.
Bajric Sanel, Ph.D. is an economist, technologist and senior software and systems engineer with more than 20 years of hands-on experience across software architecture, production infrastructure, AI, cloud/DevOps, cybersecurity, IoT and complex systems. His work focuses on the intersection of production AI, distributed systems, operational reliability, security and technology economics - particularly what happens when autonomous systems move from experimentation into real production environments. He leads technology and delivery across Bright Moon Digital, Studio387 and VendoQ, combining engineering practice with research in economics and technical sciences.
