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An agent without restraints can be extremely problematic, the panelists, representing AI security providers, agreed. "You may tell the agent to buy you shoes, and before you know it, it has bought you a car," said Mayank Agarwal, founder and CTO of Resolve AI.

"You have to think very hard about what permissions you're giving the agent. You can't just expect an agent to stay on the straight and narrow. You have to put these ironclad constraints around it to limit what it's able to do."

Along with restraint, context and intent are the key watchwords for spinning up and managing agents. "It's not just enough to know what this agent was created to do. You also have to know things like whose authority it is acting under and what it's going to do, for example, with data it's accessing," said Nancy Wang, chief technology officer for 1Password.