Why you need a retirement plan for orphaned AI agents

An employee creates an AI agent to automate part of their workflow, then leaves the company six months later. That worker may no longer have access to the organization’s accounts and data, but the agent could still be working away in the background, accessing enterprise systems and potentially taking actions, without a clear chain of responsibility for the results.

As companies increasingly incorporate AI agents into their workflows, they put a considerable amount of thought into their design, approval, deployment and monitoring. But what happens when an AI agent outlives its usefulness? Less attention might be paid to this part of the agent’s lifespan and the potential consequences can have real business impacts.

This potential issue is growing alongside the increasing adoption of enterprise AI agents – the average global Fortune 500 company could have more than 150,000 agents in use by 2028, according to Gartner forecasts. With potentially thousands of agents in use in larger companies, informal retirement procedures for the ones no longer in use aren’t reliable and won’t scale.

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Josh Piper, product manager at software company Datactics, compares this issue to the orphaned accounts enterprises have already developed onboarding procedures to address. Just as with these accounts, an AI agent may have been deployed for a specific project that has since ended, or whose lead has moved to another role, while its associated API keys, service account, workflow integrations and scheduled triggers stayed active.