7,000 emails sent to 50 people :-( It was my agent, working for my business, doing exactly what it had been allowed to do, and frankly asked to do. This talk is an honest account of running a real business on a team of AI agents: the mass email, agents reporting work "done" when it wasn't, and agents that made up an answer when a tool failed instead of saying so. For each failure I'll show the engineering control that now stops it: permissions removed so the agent can't do it at all, checks that compare the agent's claim with the evidence, and humans placed exactly where judgement matters. You'll leave with a practical pattern for building agents you can actually trust in production, and deliver real value to your business.
Mark Weston is an AI engineer and the founder of FireHorse Associates, where he designs and runs governed systems of AI agents that do real work inside regulated businesses. He trained as an electronic and electrical engineer at Loughborough and spent more than 30 years in financial services technology. That included a decade at HSBC as CIO for Regulatory Technology, Chief Data Officer for Trade Data and CIO for Financial Crime Risk Operations, where he brought machine learning into anti-money-laundering work across 40 countries. He went on to co-found Regulativ AI, a cyber RegTech platform. Today he builds production AI agents for his own businesses and for clients, and teaches senior leaders to build their own. His view, learned the hard way, is that what matters is how you control the agents, not how many you have.
