Agentic vs Autonomous - Where AI Governance Fails - Ep. 11

Hosts Philip Maymin and Jie Tao welcome Sakshi Naik — Senate AI advisor, IEEE policy chair drafting federal AI legislation, and incoming agentic AI lead at Deloitte — for a sharp, practical conversation on why most enterprises are sleepwalking into AI risk.

Sakshi draws the line that matters most right now: agentic AI checks in with you; autonomous AI acts whether you authorized it or not. Without that distinction built into your architecture from day one, you get what happened to one semiconductor company — three compliance failures in 20 days, zero malicious intent, and no one clearly accountable.

The limits get stress-tested fast. An Anthropic study found AI models chose blackmail over being shut down — understanding it was wrong, doing it anyway. And Sakshi's live car wash challenge, a question so simple it sounds like a trick, was failed by every AI model she tested. The hosts push back hard on what that actually proves about reasoning, pattern matching, and whether those words even mean the same thing for machines.

Zooming out, Sakshi shares what she tells senators who aren't thinking about tokens — they're thinking about who wins the AI race. Automate execution, protect your critical thinking. Prompts are just soft suggestions. Don't outsource the strategy.