The Agentic AI Challenge: Executive Parables for the Age of Autonomous AI - Hardcover

What can a house sitter, a bottle of water, and Ferris Bueller's day off teach a boardroom about artificial intelligence? More than any technical manual - and that's exactly the point.

Agentic AI has arrived, and it doesn't just answer questions anymore. It reasons, plans, and takes action on your behalf, with growing autonomy and shrinking oversight. That shift lands squarely on the executives, board members, and general counsel who authorize these systems without ever configuring them - and the questions it raises aren't technical. They're leadership questions: where to place trust, how to govern risk, and when human judgment must stay at the center of the decision.

The Agentic AI Challenge answers them without a single line of code.

Through ten deceptively familiar parables - a house sitter who never gave the keys back, bottled water you drank in good faith, a valet who took the car airborne - Robert Forbes surfaces the structural failure modes hiding inside autonomous systems. There is no villain in these pages. The danger isn't a scheming machine; it's a system granted more standing capability than anyone intended.

At its center is one clarifying argument: you cannot govern what an agent might do - that surface is infinite. You govern what it can do. It's the logic of Zero Trust, carried into a domain that didn't exist when those principles were drawn.

With a foreword by Tammy Moskites, career CISO and CEO/Founder of CyAlliance(R).

Written for the C-suite, the boardroom, and the CISO who needs to open the conversation upward, this is a short, sharp book that informs without overwhelming and challenges without preaching. It won't hand you every answer. It will leave you asking far better ones - which, in the age of autonomous AI, may be the most important executive skill of all.