What Governance Model Works for Humans and Agents?

Organizations managing both human workers and AI agents need an effective governance approach. The answer is a unified governance model enabled by a single workforce risk framework that treats humans and agents as one integrated workforce, applying consistent principles for identity management, access control, observability, risk-based security, and continuous review.

As organizations deploy AI agents alongside human workers, a critical question emerges: what governance model can effectively manage both? The answer is a unified governance approach built on a single workforce risk model – a framework that treats humans and agents as one integrated workforce and provides consistent methods for evaluating risk across all identities.

This approach addresses both the governance structure (who owns AI, who accesses it, what controls are in place) and the risk evaluation framework (how to measure and manage that risk consistently). Instead of maintaining separate policies and risk assessments for people versus AI systems, organizations implement a consistent framework that scales across their entire workforce, whether human or artificial.

The Answer: A Single Workforce Risk Model

A unified governance approach requires a single workforce risk model that operates on five core principles:

1. Treat People and Agents as Equal Identities: Both people and agents are treated as first-class identities within the organization's identity and access management system. Each identity has designated owners who are accountable for their actions, service level agreements defining expected behavior and risk thresholds, and clear lifecycle management from provisioning through deprovisioning. This unified identity framework ensures that agents aren't hidden scripts or shadow IT. They should be documented, owned, and managed as formal members of your workforce.
2. Grant Minimum Access for Minimum Time: Access control principles that protect against human risk apply equally to agentic risk. Both humans and agents operate under least privilege principles where access is limited to only what's necessary, just-in-time provisioning where elevated permissions are granted temporarily and revoked when no longer needed, and time-bounded credentials that automatically expire. This approach dramatically reduces blast radius for both insider threats and agent compromises.
3. Track Every Action with Standardized Logs:  Effective governance demands visibility into all workforce activities. The single workforce risk model requires standardized logging across human and agent actions, documented approvals for access requests and privilege escalations, and audit trails that provide evidence for compliance reporting and incident investigation. By integrating security data from both human behaviors and agent operations into unified dashboards, organizations gain comprehensive risk visibility where behavioral anomalies trigger the same alerting and review processes regardless of source.
4. Match Security to Potential Impact: The more a workforce member can touch, the stronger the gates must be. High-impact access to production databases, financial systems, or customer data requires multi-factor authentication, approval workflows, and enhanced monitoring for both humans and agents. Broader scope means more stringent controls, regardless of whether the identity is human or artificial. This risk-based approach ensures governance overhead scales appropriately: low-risk agents handling routine tasks face lighter controls, while agents with broad access to sensitive systems face the same rigorous requirements as privileged human users.
5. Review and Re-Certify Access Regularly:  Access reviews aren't just for humans anymore. The single workforce risk model requires regular re-certification of both human access rights and agent scopes, periodic validation that agents still need their current permissions and that owners remain appropriate, and automated workflows flagging dormant agents, scope creep, or access that no longer aligns with business justification. Just as you conduct quarterly access reviews for employees, agents undergo the same scrutiny.

How Do I Implement the Single Workforce Risk Model?

Deploy identity and access management systems that recognize both humans and agents as workforce identities. Ensure every agent has a documented owner, clear purpose, and defined performance expectations. Apply least privilege and just-in-time access principles uniformly, configuring systems to grant temporary elevated permissions with automatic expiration. For high-impact resources, require approval workflows regardless of whether the requestor is human or agent.

Effective governance depends on unified visibility into your entire threat landscape. By connecting disparate data sources (employee behaviors, agent operations, system vulnerabilities, and access control logs) organizations gain comprehensive insights into both human risk and agentic risk. Standardize logging formats so human and agent activities flow into unified monitoring systems, and deploy analytics that identify anomalies across your entire workforce.

Leverage governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software to provide critical infrastructure for managing hybrid workforces, integrating human risk management platforms that unify visibility across all workforce identities. 

Modern GRC solutions enable organizations to streamline risk management processes, ensure regulatory compliance, and strengthen overall governance structures by integrating human risk data with agentic risk monitoring in a single platform. Key components include unified risk visibility that consolidates data from human behaviors and agent operations, proactive threat detection that identifies behavioral anomalies before they escalate, automated risk scoring that prioritizes risks based on integrated analysis, and real-time reporting through dynamic dashboards.

Schedule periodic access reviews covering both human permissions and agent scopes. Automate workflows that prompt owners to validate continued need for agent access, flag scope creep and dormant identities, and treat agent recertification with the same rigor as employee access reviews.

What Governance Structures Support This Model?

While the single workforce risk model provides the operational framework, organizations must choose governance structures that support its implementation. Centralized structures concentrate policy-making authority to ensure consistent application across the organization, while decentralized approaches distribute implementation authority to enable teams to operationalize the model within their specific contexts. 

Hybrid structures balance centralized policy-making with decentralized execution, and committee-based approaches leverage cross-functional teams to ensure diverse perspectives inform policy decisions.

Measuring Effectiveness

Despite AI’s capabilities, human oversight remains essential. Autonomous agents operate at lightning speed and maintain their own layer of access controls, which means they can introduce risk faster than traditional processes. Human oversight ensures these agents do not inadvertently increase organizational risk, providing judgment, context, and intervention where necessary. 

Establish clear protocols for when and how humans should intervene, especially in high-stakes decisions, to ensure AI actions align with ethical standards, organizational values, and overall risk management objectives, while future HRM platforms evolve to monitor AI Agents as they do humans and provide the necessary human oversight.

To ensure your risk management program is truly effective, it is critical to measure governance performance across your workforce and continuously validate that controls are working as intended.

• Track key performance indicators that measure governance effectiveness across your entire workforce, including access review completion rates, time-to-provision, anomaly detection accuracy, and incident response times. 
• Regularly audit whether all agents are properly registered as first-class identities with documented owners and defined expectations. 
• Assess whether least privilege principles are consistently applied and confirm that logging captures activities from all workforce identities. 
• Evaluate re-certification completion rates and measure how effectively continuous review processes prevent privilege accumulation.

The key takeaway: a single workforce risk model that treats humans and agents as one integrated workforce operating under unified principles is a necessity. 

This unified approach eliminates the fragmentation and gaps created by separate governance models for human risk and agentic risk. As AI agents become increasingly prevalent, the single workforce risk model provides the scalable foundation needed to maintain security, ensure compliance, and manage risk effectively, regardless of whether workforce members are human or artificial.

Learn how Living Security's human risk management platform integrates with your GRC strategy to create unified visibility across your entire workforce.