Enterprise practice guide
How to Design Permissions, Approval, and Audit for Digital Employees
Governance is not a log review after an agent fails. It establishes identity before execution, applies policy and approval during execution, and preserves replayable evidence afterward.
01
Start with the authorization subject
Separate independent employees from assistants, then bind read, write, and tool access to explicit roles. Administrator credentials must not become the default execution channel.
02
Control risk before the action
Reading public knowledge, changing customer state, sending an external message, and making a financial commitment require different controls. Risk tiers should determine allow, request-context, approve, or deny.
- Action and business object
- Blast radius and reversibility
- Value, volume, and sensitivity
- Approver and timeout behavior
03
Audit must explain why
Useful evidence includes workspace, employee version, caller, retrieved context, plan, tool calls, policy decisions, approval, and write-back. A single “success” event is not enough for security review.