IBM Consulting and Microsoft have announced Imagine Enterprise, a platform for building, running and governing industry-specific AI agents. IBM says it is bringing more than 6,000 prebuilt agents and assets from its consulting delivery platform, while Microsoft supplies cloud, data, identity and security technologies. Qualifying engagements can also receive forward-deployed engineering support from both companies.

The initial frameworks cover financial services, insurance and retail. SEI is cited as an early example of the type of enterprise transformation the platform is intended to support, with the investment-services company exploring agentic capabilities across its operations. The announcement is a joint vendor description rather than an independent evaluation, and it does not disclose pricing, production adoption or evidence that the full agent library has been validated for every regulated use case.

The more useful question is how much of the platform is genuinely reusable once an organisation applies its own data, permissions and controls. A catalogue can shorten design work, but regulated deployment still requires named ownership, testing, observability, change control and clear boundaries between recommendation and execution. The partnership is significant because it moves competition beyond individual models towards packaged operating systems for agents, including the consulting and governance work needed to put them into production.

Execution Level Governance- What audit-ready agent governance actually looks like
David Girvin, founder and CEO of Assury argues that model-in-the-loop review, AI governing AI, is fundamentally unreliable for regulated environments: even the best-performing models miss a meaningful share of violations, the reviewing model is typically provided by the same vendor being reviewed, and prompt injection or context poisoning can compromise both the acting agent and its supposed overseer simultaneously. He makes the case for deterministic, architecturally enforced controls instead, walking through Assury's approach of autonomy zones, session risk accumulation, and credential starvation, which lets a compromised agent be cut off from its tools instantly rather than relying on time-boxed access. The conversation touches on why David is sceptical of just-in-time credentialing as a solution for agent security more broadly, since agent sessions don't run on predictable human timescales, along with the current gap between how identity and security vendors are pitching agent protection and what he sees happening at the execution layer in practice. He also discusses the compliance and audit implications of probabilistic decision-making, arguing that regulated industries will increasingly need tamper-evident, hash-chained audit trails that can withstand scrutiny from auditors and regulators who are only beginning to understand agentic risk, and reflects on a named frontier lab's own published framework as an example of the gap between research and practitioner reality. Elsewhere, David reflects candidly on building a bootstrapped security company in an increasingly crowded market, why he turned down aggressive VC funding to stay in control of the product, and what a credible third-party assessment of his own gateway would need to look like given that Assury sits directly in the execution path for every customer's agents.
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