The Time to Act is Now
The Present: Executives Are Watching from a Distance
Today, executives stand back and watch from a distance. This makes it difficult for them to appreciate the risks, the obstacles, and the possibilities. We are quite advanced in some very sophisticated AGI experiments carried out by few; and somewhat paralyzed and expectant in the vast majority of places.
For many telecommunications companies, scaling AGI will demand large investments in data and platforms. We will navigate a few years of transition—at times vertiginous, at times turbulent. But inertia is no longer a competitive option. Companies that fail to build governance capabilities over AGI will discover too late that others built them first.
The Barrier Has Fallen: Executives Can Now Design Governance
Until recently, designing governance over technology required being a technologist. The barrier has shifted. Executives don't need to become engineers—but they can now participate directly in the design of governance, because governance increasingly lives in executable logic: permissions, escalation paths, audit trails, evaluation tests, and kill switches. With modern AGI tooling, these controls become legible, testable, and discussable across functions.
This radically transforms the executive's position vis-à-vis technology. It is no longer about delegating and waiting for reports. It is about entering the design loop: prototyping workflows, simulating failure, measuring cost and quality, and iterating before scaling—together with engineers, lawyers, risk leaders, and operators. The excuse "I'm not technical" is over—not because executives must write production code, but because the core governance choices are now inspectable and testable at the executive level.
This is the central task: reinventing executive work with agents subject to a governance regime that the executives themselves design. Only then does anxiety diminish, risks become comprehensible, delegation happen with judgment, and agents get managed with authority.
Governance: The Art of Preserving Institutional Order
Governance is the power to order, integrate, and exclude. In business, it is the set of practices, roles, and routines that seek to preserve the competitive capacity to generate value, mitigate risks, and anticipate scenarios of uncertainty. It is the art of preserving an institutional order in an unpredictable and frequently disruptive world: accelerating obsolescence, postponing obsolescence, opening new spaces.
Governance tasks become most critical in situations of change. In recent decades, governance capabilities have been created to ensure fair trade in global supply chains, improve industrial safety, control money laundering, protect gender relations, moderate environmental impact, and prevent organized digital crime. Governance is a costly activity; and in general, the best governance is the governance that becomes invisible—because it is embedded in architecture, incentives, and routines.
Why AI governance is not like fair-trade, safety, or environmental governance: those regimes mostly govern stable processes—bounded workflows, known decision points, and auditable transactions. Agentic AI governs a moving decision surface: models, prompts, tools, permissions, and feedback loops that can change weekly. The object of governance is not only behavior; it is the architecture that produces behavior. That is why AI governance cannot be an additional reporting layer. It must be an architectural layer.
AGI: A Force Majeure That Demands Governance
For the past six years, AGI has been the disruptive vector that has reactivated governance alarms in business and nation-states. It is an extremely powerful technology that feeds on and competes with essential dimensions of what we have thought human beings are—in peace and in war, in virtue and in crime.
AGI is a hybrid technology with behaviors different from those we were accustomed to:
- It is not deterministic; it is probabilistic and exhibits idiosyncratic behaviors
- Its decision mechanisms are opaque
- It is a portable power that can be used for any purpose
- It expands security risks
- Its supply chain distributes risk, value, and accountability in new ways
- It accelerates obsolescence asymmetrically
In summary: AGI is a force majeure—non-deterministic, difficult to understand, capable of creating and destroying value at scale. This demands deliberate governance, not passive waiting.
The Four Domains of AGI Governance
In our view, there are four governance domains relevant to AGI. Each operates at a different scale and answers a different question. Together they constitute a complete framework for governing AGI adoption in an organization.
1. Security and Risk
Question: How do we protect people, data, and assets?
Security and risk governance is resolved through proper architecture of hardware, virtual hardware, software, and contracts. Not all trade-offs are obvious, nor are the solutions simple; but adequate governance of architectures is highly competitive. In telecommunications, where critical infrastructure is the business itself, this domain is the irreducible baseline.
2. Token Economics
Question: What does what we are doing with AGI actually cost?
As Harry Seldon says, we have to learn to count before we can decide what to preserve. The tokenization of AGI engineering is a solid foundation for understanding its economics, creating value models, metrics, and dashboards for tools, processes, and platforms. Without token accounting, there is no economic governance possible.
3. Total Accountability over AGI Agents
Question: Who is responsible for each agent and each automated decision?
This standard is fundamental. There can be no ownerless agents in a business. AGI agents are peculiar, but they behave in ways very similar to humans; there is no staff without supervisors in a business organization. Tools, processes, systems: every AGI agent needs a human owner with the authority to intervene, correct, or deactivate.
4. ROI on Augmented Capabilities
Question: How is the investment in AGI justified at each scale of the business?
In this domain there are three scopes:
- Individuals who collaborate in teams and have a business case to justify, execute, and measure an investment
- Business units that operate services and products with decentralized teams and justify their AGI investment through their strategy and business plan
- Platform investments that transcend individual business units and have an institutional character—justified by the long-term value of the company
The Lifecycle: How Governance Is Regulated
The fewer resources dedicated to governance overhead, the better. Our vision is that governance is most competitive when it is embedded in architecture, norms, and incentives—rather than performed as a separate bureaucracy. Establishing governance at those levels almost without exception requires involvement from senior management, along with laws, regulations, enforcement, training, and continuous technical validation.
This is where the democratization of code that AGI offers becomes a concrete strategic advantage. If the most competitive governance is the kind embedded in architecture, and if AGI enables executives to design architecture directly, then executives today have the capacity to build governance from the inside—not to supervise it from the outside.
The Time Is Now
We believe now is the time to break the inertia with resolve while actively managing risks. Experiment, refine, scale, discard. This scenario requires distributed governance, with a centralized laser.
The four domains offer a map. The fall of the technical barrier offers the opportunity. What is missing is the decision to enter the terrain personally—not as distant supervisors, but as designers of the institutional order that will govern the next era of their businesses.