Enterprises that run more than a handful of AI agents in production face risk, cost and oversight burdens that grow exponentially with every agent they add, says Felix Van de Maele, founder and CEO of data governance company Collibra. In a conversation with VentureBeat founder and CEO Matt Marshall at VentureBeat's AI Week event in New York, Van de Maele traced most agent failures to the business context those agents receive — and said companies need deterministic controls on agent behavior before their agent count grows.

As confidential computing comes to GPUs, it can protect sensitive workloads, but enterprises also need evidence that they can identify agents, isolate tenants and revoke access without disrupting operations.