When AI systems act autonomously, coordinate across tools, and proliferate outside IT visibility, the vocabulary buyers use to describe what's happening traces back to a single governance question: who is accountable when the agent acts?
Agentic AI
Define: An AI system that takes multi-step actions (browsing, writing, executing, deciding) without requiring human approval at each step.
Stake: CISA's 2025 AI security guidance identifies autonomous action as a primary attack surface expansion, noting that agents operating without human-in-the-loop controls introduce authorization and accountability gaps that existing access policies weren't designed to address.
Ask:
"When you say your teams are piloting AI agents — are those agents operating with standing access to systems, or does someone have to approve each action before it happens?"
AI Orchestration
Define: The coordination layer that routes work between multiple AI agents or models, managing what each agent can access and do to complete a complex task.
Stake: The Cloud Security Alliance's 2025 AI Safety report identifies orchestration layers as high-risk trust boundaries, because a misconfigured orchestrator can grant agents access far beyond what any individual agent was authorized to hold.
Ask:
"Do you have a single orchestration layer managing your agents, or are different teams standing up their own coordination tools independently?"
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
Definition cross-referenced against Anthropic's published specification and OWASP's AI security guidance, verified May 2026. Protocol ecosystem and tooling support are evolving rapidly — confirm current adoption status before positioning.
Define: An open protocol, published by Anthropic in late 2024, that standardizes how AI agents connect to external tools, data sources, and services, giving agents a common interface for interacting with systems outside the model itself.
Stake: OWASP's 2025 Top 10 for LLM Applications flags MCP-connected tools as a prompt injection and privilege escalation risk, because agents inherit the permissions of whatever service they connect to through the protocol.
Ask:
"Has your architecture team started evaluating MCP-compatible tooling, or is this still at the design discussion stage?"
Shadow AI
Define: AI tools and agents deployed by employees or teams outside IT governance, without security review, approved procurement, or visibility into what data those tools access or retain.
Stake: Gartner estimated in 2025 that more than 40 percent of enterprise AI tool usage occurs outside IT-sanctioned channels, a pattern federal audit teams are now surfacing in internal findings alongside data handling violations.
Ask:
"Outside of the AI initiatives your CISO's office is tracking, do you have a sense of how many teams are running their own tools against agency data?"
Kill Switch
Define: A control mechanism, technical or procedural, that lets an organization immediately halt an AI agent's operations when it behaves unexpectedly or poses a security risk.
Stake: OMB Memorandum M-24-10 requires federal agencies to maintain the ability to shut down AI systems posing safety or security risks, making documented halt capability an agency obligation, not a discretionary safeguard.
Ask:
"If an agent started taking actions your team didn't anticipate, what's your current process for shutting it down — and how quickly can that actually happen?"