EP 78: Do You Know What Agents You Have Running? Transcend's Rowan Stewart on AI Agent Governance

Rowan Stewart has watched companies rush AI products to market without the governance to back them up, first at BCG and now at Transcend, where the clients include Robinhood, Brex, and Groupon. Sam and Rowan discuss why governance works best as infrastructure from day one, and why agents raise the stakes.

Topics covered:

• "Pilot purgatory": why promising AI proofs of concept die at the edge of production
• The cost of rushing: lost customer trust and bad press matter more than regulatory fines
• Embedded vs. bolted-on governance: a stack of paperwork and a handshake vs. encoded, auditable controls
• Deterministic controls for non-deterministic systems, and why a system prompt isn't a real control
• Human in the loop at scale: a 100-person company with five agents per employee, and how SMBs should adapt
• Why agents shouldn't inherit their owner's permissions, and why MCP tool restrictions aren't sufficient
• Agent observability: knowing what your agents are doing across the enterprise
• How guardrails let teams move faster, and using signals like denial rates to tune policy
• AI governance vs. responsible AI: business outcomes vs. net benefit to humanity
• The one gap to fix first: do you know what agents you even have running?
• Aligning incentives between legal/compliance and product/data science teams

Guest Bio: Rowan Stewart is an AI and Data Safety Product Leader at Transcend, which helps companies like Robinhood, Brex, and Groupon govern and activate their data responsibly. Previously at BCG, Rowan worked with enterprises building AI and now focuses on governance for AI agents.

Connect: Find Rowan Stewart on LinkedIn. Rowan's profile link is in the show notes.