India, April 14 -- Walk into any large Indian bank or IT services firm today and chances are an AI agent is already at work. These are not chatbots but autonomous systems that send emails, manage databases, and make decisions without human intervention. The competitive pressure to deploy them is intense. But security experts warn that enterprises are handing significant power to systems they do not yet fully know how to control.

"These are probabilistic entities. You cannot exactly predict what they will do," said Arvind Nithrakashyap, co-founder and CTO of US-listed cybersecurity company Rubrik, and an IIT Madras alumnus. "Agents are fast. They can cause 10x the damage in 1x the time of humans."

A race without guardrails

Gartner estim...