Stop Agent Sprawl: Boomi Agentstudio for Secure, Compliant AI at Scale

AI Strategy Boomi: AI Agent Governance and Why it Can't Wait

AI agents are moving from prototypes to production. As CEO and Chairman of Boomi, Steve Lucas focuses on AI-driven integration at scale and the operational discipline needed to do it safely.

The opportunity is clear: automate stubborn manual work, reduce cycle times and improve outcomes across customer support, finance, and operations. The risk is just as clear: agent sprawl, opaque decision-making, and security gaps that create real exposure.

Analyst signals say the wave is coming. Gartner estimates that 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028. Deloitte reports that 26% of organisations are exploring autonomous agent development. If you don't have an agent governance plan, you're already behind.

The dilemma: unmanaged agents

Boomi highlights the core failure modes teams are already seeing:

• Security: agents with broad permissions, weak isolation, and access to sensitive data
• Compliance: no audit trail, unclear consent, missing data retention and residency controls
• Accountability: no clear owner when an agent takes an action or makes a poor decision
• Observability: limited visibility into what ran, when, with what inputs, and why

Autonomous and semi-autonomous actions without guardrails increase the odds of rogue behavior, unintended consequences, and bad business calls. Without defined lines of responsibility, incidents slip through the cracks.

Principles that create transparency and trust

Boomi recommends treating agent governance as a product discipline. Build it into the lifecycle, centralize visibility, document decisions, align with international standards, and keep humans in the loop for high-risk actions.

Build governance into the full agent lifecycle

Governance should be intrinsic from design to deployment to monitoring. Alison Biggan, Chief Marketing Officer at Boomi, underscores the need for policy by default, not policy by exception.

• Access control: restrict who can build agents and which data, apps, and services they can reach (enforce least privilege by role)
• Composable architectures: use reusable, pre-approved components that automatically apply security and compliance rules
• Deployment gates: agents run only in authorised environments with signed configurations and versioned policies
• Runtime guardrails: rate limits, tool whitelists, PII redaction, DLP checks, and approval steps for high-impact actions

Centralise visibility across every agent

Expect hundreds or thousands of agents across teams and vendors. You need one source of truth.

• Unified inventory: who owns each agent, where it runs, what tools and data it can access
• Monitoring and logs: prompts, actions, data touched, outcomes, and error signals in one dashboard
• Health and security posture: performance, drift, policy violations, and auto-disable rules
• Kill switch and rollback: disable, quarantine, and revert to known-good versions fast

Document for global compliance

Documentation isn't bureaucracy. It's your defense and your reputation. Chris Hallenbeck, Senior Vice President and General Manager of AI at Boomi, points to clear records that explain what agents do and why.

• Design decisions: risks considered, data used, mitigations, human review points
• Change history: model updates, prompt changes, tool additions, and policy revisions
• Operational parameters: environments, access scopes, SLAs, and escalation paths
• Outcome logs: what ran, who approved it, what result occurred

Store this centrally so security teams, auditors, and business leaders can verify compliance quickly.

Work with international standards

Common principles make governance portable across regions and sectors. Guidance from the OECD and IEEE helps create shared practices while allowing local nuance.

• OECD AI Principles
• IEEE guidance for autonomous and intelligent systems

Human-in-the-loop where it matters

Autonomy needs oversight. Keep humans informed, trained, and responsible for high-risk decisions.

• Escalation protocols: thresholds that require approval (payments, PII exposure, production changes)
• Audit trails: who approved what, when, and based on which evidence
• Dynamic policy adaptation: update rules in near real time as regulations evolve or models drift

Boomi Agentstudio: lifecycle management for agents

Effective agent management reduces risk and improves alignment with business goals. Boomi Agentstudio is presented as the only full agent lifecycle management solution that lets organisations design, govern, and orchestrate AI agents at scale-embedding governance at the start, not as an afterthought.

With Boomi's vendor-agnostic approach, enterprises can bring agents, data, apps, and APIs into a single, observable ecosystem. Combined with Boomi's iPaaS foundation, the Boomi Enterprise Platform connects applications, enforces API governance, secures data flows, and centralises agent oversight so teams can move beyond pilots and scale with confidence.

Your 90-day governance plan

• Inventory: catalogue all agents (internal and vendor), owners, access, environments
• Access: enforce least privilege and sign all agent configurations
• Templates: standardise prompts, tools, and policies with pre-approved components
• Gates: add approval flows for high-impact actions and production deploys
• Observability: centralise logs, traces, and policy-violation alerts; enable a kill switch
• Compliance: codify documentation requirements and automate evidence collection
• Incident response: define playbooks for rollback, quarantine, and stakeholder comms
• Education: train builders and approvers on safe agent patterns and failure modes

Skill up your team

If you need structured upskilling for AI builders, reviewers, and program owners, explore practical learning paths and certifications here: AI courses by job role.