Agentic AI + Zero Trust: A Guide for Business Leaders - Paperback

by Josh Woodruff (Author), Michelle Savage (Author), John Kindervag (Foreword by)

Every business leader knows they need AI agents. Almost none know how to deploy them without catastrophic risk. Until now.

You don't need to know what "Zero Trust" means to read this book. In fact, that's the point. Agentic AI + Zero Trust explains-plainly and practically-how business leaders can deploy AI agents safely, successfully, and at scale.

While 83% of enterprises race to adopt AI, many expose themselves to risks that make headlines for all the wrong reasons. Zillow lost $380 million. Air Canada was forced to honor promises its chatbot invented. A financial AI in Japan executed hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized trades. These failures weren't inevitable-they were preventable.

What the headlines miss is that, at the same time, other organizations are quietly generating real value with autonomous agents while their competitors debate governance. The difference isn't speed. It's architecture. The companies that succeed build security in from day one.

The brutal truth: 87% of AI initiatives never make it past the pilot stage. This book is written for the 13% who intend to succeed.

Written by a technology leader with over three decades of experience-from the early internet to today's agentic AI systems-this is not a technical manual. It's a conversational, story-driven guide for executives, board members, and decision-makers who refuse to choose between innovation and protection.

You'll find this book invaluable if you are:

- A CEO who knows AI agents are inevitable but can't get clear answers on safe deployment

- An executive watching competitors announce "AI-powered" everything while your teams are stuck in committees

- A leader who just discovered AI agents are already running inside your organization

- A board member asking tough questions about AI risk and getting jargon in return

- Anyone unwilling to trade security for speed

Inside, you'll discover:

- The Agentic Trust Framework-a Fortune 500-tested architecture for AI agents you can actually trust

- Real-world AI failures-and exactly how they could have been prevented

- Why the fastest-moving organizations don't skip security-they use it as an accelerator

- A practical 90-day roadmap from AI-curious to safely operational with measurable ROI

- Industry playbooks spanning healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and retail

- Crisis protocols for when autonomous agents misbehave at 3 a.m.

- The hidden reasons so many agentic AI initiatives fail-and how to avoid them

Developed through years of hands-on work with organizations operating at the edge of this frontier, the Agentic Trust Framework distills hard-earned lessons from both success and failure. It combines battle-tested Zero Trust principles with emerging AI practices to help leaders architect for tomorrow-not just deploy for today.

The age of autonomous AI is here. Your agents will either be secured intentionally, or you'll learn the hard way. You don't need to wait for disaster to strike to understand the risks.

Stop watching from the sidelines while competitors deploy AI agents that never sleep and make split-second decisions worth millions. Learn the security-first approach that separates successful AI leaders from those stuck in pilot purgatory.

Your competitors are already reading this book. When will you?