Give your 'human-level agents' a proper head start with these 3 best practices

Written by Tiernan Ray, Senior Contributing WriterSenior Contributing Writer May 4, 2026 at 7:08 a.m. PT Tharon Green/ZDNET/Getty ImagesFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. Computing is at the threshold of "nearly human-level agents," according to Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft CEO of AI, in a recent opinion column for the MIT Technology Review.  But there are many stumbling blocks along the way. Businesses are overwhelmed with trying to redesign their workflows and decide what information agentic AI programs should have access to.  A consequence of the challenges, database technology giant Databricks noted in its recent State of AI Agents report, is that "Only 19% of organizations have deployed AI agents, and mostly to a limited extent." "If you talk to a lot of chief financial officers, they will tell you, 'I have three concerns'," Craig Wiley, the head of AI for Databricks, told ZDNET. "Can you control it, can you tell me if it's any good [meaning, does what comes out of the model actually provide value], and how much does it cost?" To address those concerns, said Wiley, enterprises should consider up-front, before they implement agents, three best practices:  Craig Wiley"Can you control it?" boils down to the practice of governance, which starts with controlling what data an agent will access.  AnAI agent is an artificial intelligence program that can go beyond simple turn-by-turn prompting, as offered by ChatGPT an