Managing Your Agentic Employees
AI agents now see, decide, and act on company data — which makes them digital employees, not just software. And a compromised or over-permissioned agent is an unsupervised insider. Written for security leaders, this course lays out how to govern agentic AI the way you'd run a workforce: give every agent an identity, a job description, a human manager, least-privilege access, and a kill switch. Drawing on safety-critical engineering and a hard look at real agentic incidents, you'll leave with a governance model you can actually put into production.
Curriculum
Five parts — from the mindset shift, through the full digital-employee lifecycle and the controls that keep agents in bounds, to the real incidents that prove the point.
Introduction
Agentic AI risk and the changing security landscape. Why a compromised or over-permissioned agent is an unsupervised insider — and the mindset shift from treating agents as software to managing them as employees, with identities, roles, authority, and accountability.
Employee Management
The full employee lifecycle for AI agents: identity, roles, ownership, and least-privilege access; boundaries, delegation, and decision authority; onboarding, training, performance reviews, governance check-ins, and termination.
Agent Governance
The operational controls that keep agents in bounds: secrets management and continuous authorization, agent and privileged-action monitoring, tool and third-party trust, safety guardrails, incident response, and kill controls.
Learning from Real-World Failures
Landmark agentic incidents — EchoLeak, Replit's deleted production database, JadePuffer, the Postmark MCP and Salesloft Drift attacks — the patterns behind them, and the governance minimum bar you can put in place tomorrow.
Key Takeaways
A practical minimum governance bar for production AI agents: how to decide whether an agent is actually ready to deploy, and the human oversight that keeps it accountable once it is.
Earn a certificate
Finish the course and earn a verifiable certificate — issued by AI Security University with its own public verification page, and shareable straight to your LinkedIn profile.
- Public verification page
- Counts toward 2 CPE credits
- Open Badge compatible
- Add to LinkedIn
To earn it: Pass the final quiz.
See a sample credentialYour instructor
Darren Shelcusky
Darren Shelcusky is Principal at Cyvantis LLC, with 45+ years in the automotive industry and 12 awarded patents. At Ford, he established and operated the company's global product cybersecurity observability platforms.
He has provided oversight across hundreds of billions of API calls, hundreds of terabytes of API transactions, 25M+ vehicles, 6M+ consumers, and 48K+ API endpoints — and advises companies on building and maturing their commercial security offerings. He's a frequent speaker at API, AI, security, and automotive conferences.
AI isn't a product you buy. It's a workforce you manage.
Free and self-paced. Enroll and start whenever you're ready.