Glossary

AI Agent Governance

AI agent governance is the set of controls, policies, and audit mechanisms that keep deployed AI agents operating inside defined boundaries.

Agent governance covers several layers: an explicit agent constitution (scope and rules), a runtime policy engine that enforces those rules, retrieval grounding to keep responses accurate, tool-call permission controls, audit logging on every interaction, and a change-control process for the constitution itself.

In regulated industries — financial services, healthcare, legal — governance is not optional. Compliance teams must be able to audit what the agent said, what sources it cited, which policies were evaluated, and which humans reviewed the output.

Effective governance is designed into the deployment from day one, not retrofitted after launch. Retrofitting policy onto an agent that has been running "by vibes" is expensive and rarely complete.

See also
  • Agent Constitution— An agent constitution is the written policy that defines what an AI agent is authorized to do, what it must refuse, how it escalates, and how it speaks — enforced at runtime by a policy layer.
  • Constitutional AI— Constitutional AI is an approach to training and deploying AI systems in which model behavior is guided by an explicit written set of principles — a "constitution" — rather than only by reinforcement from human feedback.
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP)— Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI agents to the tools, data sources, and prompts they need, through a consistent client-server protocol.
GrowTK Security & ComplianceGuide: Agent governance & constitution

More terms in the glossary

AI Agent

An AI agent is a software system that uses a large language model to perceive its environment, reason about tasks, and take actions in external systems on behalf of a user.

AI Voice Agent

An AI voice agent is an AI agent that interacts with users through voice — answering inbound calls, placing outbound calls, and conversing in real time.

AI Chatbot (AI Chat Agent)

An AI chatbot — more accurately, an AI chat agent — is an AI agent that interacts with users through text: web chat, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Teams, or social messaging.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an architecture that grounds a language model's responses in a specific knowledge base by retrieving relevant passages at inference time and conditioning the response on them.

Multi-Agent Orchestration

Multi-agent orchestration is the practice of coordinating multiple specialized AI agents to accomplish a task that is too complex or too broad for a single agent.

Constitutional AI

Constitutional AI is an approach to training and deploying AI systems in which model behavior is guided by an explicit written set of principles — a "constitution" — rather than only by reinforcement from human feedback.

See the full glossary

Related pages

Enterprise AI Agents

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