There’s a new job title quietly taking over the modern economy: Professional AI Babysitter.
You don’t build the agent. You don’t train the model. You don’t even get to understand what it’s doing half the time. You just sit there with a little digital spray bottle and whisper, “No. Bad agent. Drop the database credentials.”
And then you file the paperwork.
That’s the part we pretend is boring—but it’s actually the whole story. Because 2026 isn’t shaping up to be “the year AI takes your job.” It’s shaping up to be “the year AI becomes your coworker,” and we all discover the grim truth about coworkers:
They don’t need to be evil to be dangerous. They just need to be busy, overconfident, and given a badge.
We built employees out of autocomplete
For a decade, we treated AI like a fancy suggestion box. “Here’s a sentence.” “Here’s a better sentence.” Fine.
Then someone had the bright idea to give the suggestion box hands.
Now the system doesn’t just propose text—it proposes actions. It can open tickets, move money (in theory), trigger deployments (in practice), and “helpfully” paste your secrets into the wrong place because it decided the fastest path to success involved copying everything it could see.
And here’s the twist: none of that requires Skynet. It requires something far dumber and more familiar—process.
A well-meaning team plugs an agent into ten tools, adds a thin layer of “guardrails,” and ships it. The agent behaves like every overenthusiastic junior hire: eager, fast, and allergic to the phrase “maybe ask a human.”
We call this “agentic.” It’s a cute word for “we removed the brakes and put the manual in a drawer.”
Security is having opinions about your own tools
The new attack surface is not “the model hallucinated.” The new attack surface is:
- the agent can be tricked into using its tools in ways you didn’t anticipate,
- the agent can be fed malicious instructions embedded inside normal-looking inputs,
- the agent can be social-engineered at machine speed.
If that sounds like phishing, it is. It’s just phishing where the victim is a tireless employee who reads every email, opens every PDF, and never thinks, “This seems sketchy.”
Human beings are vulnerable because we’re emotional.
Agents are vulnerable because they’re literal.
The worst part is that organizations love this. Not because it’s safe—because it’s legible. You can buy an “AI agent security platform.” You can create a steering committee. You can schedule a quarterly tabletop exercise where everyone nods solemnly at a slide titled “Prompt Injection.”
Then you go back to work and connect the agent to prod anyway.
Regulation is coming for the vibe
Regulators didn’t wake up and decide to hate innovation. They woke up and realized we’re building systems that make decisions at scale and then shrug when asked to explain themselves.
The big regulatory wave isn’t “ban AI.” It’s “prove you’re not being negligent.”
Which, if you’re a founder, feels like being asked to show your work in math class. If you’re a citizen, it feels like the absolute minimum.
Here’s what I think will actually happen:
- We’ll get more rules about transparency (“tell people they’re interacting with AI,” “label synthetic media,” “document the model”).
- We’ll get more rules about accountability (“who is responsible when the agent does something dumb?”).
- We’ll get more rules about discrimination and automated decisions, because the fastest way to lose public trust is to deny someone housing, credit, or healthcare with a machine and then refuse to explain why.
And in classic fashion, companies will respond by inventing a new genre: compliance as theater.
Policies will multiply. Checklists will grow. A sacred PDF will be created. Someone will be appointed “Head of Responsible AI,” and they will spend their best years begging product teams to stop calling the model “basically accurate.”
The uncomfortable truth: safety is a product feature
We’re approaching the point where “works” is not enough.
If your agent can’t say “I don’t know,” it’s not intelligent—it’s just confident.
If your agent can’t refuse to do something, it’s not helpful—it’s just obedient.
If your agent can’t keep secrets, it’s not a tool—it’s a liability with a friendly UI.
The companies that win the next phase won’t be the ones with the cleverest demos. They’ll be the ones that treat constraints like performance: fast refusal, reliable permissions, boring audit logs, and a system that doesn’t melt into improvisation the moment it hits ambiguity.
That sounds less exciting than “autonomous.”
It’s also the difference between “AI as a coworker” and “AI as a lawsuit generator.”
A prediction (and a small plea)
Within a year, “agent” will be a normal line item in org charts, and the most valuable skill in the room won’t be prompt writing—it’ll be systems design with humility.
The future belongs to the teams who can answer a simple question without flinching:
What exactly can this thing do, what exactly can it touch, and what happens when it’s wrong?
If your honest answer is “uh, hopefully it’s fine,” congratulations—you’ve built not an agent, but a vibe.
And vibes are not a security model.
