Governing AI Agents at Scale: Identity, Scope, and Observability (with Glean and Cvent) | CXOTalk #914

About this episode

Cvent's CIO and CISO discuss governing AI agents at scale and the AWARE framework.

Pradeep Mannakkara (CIO) and Ben Mayrides (CISO) of Cvent explain how they govern AI agents at scale across their 5,500-person organization, which now has over 6,000 agents in production. In this fireside chat recorded at a Glean event in NYC, they walk through the AWARE framework developed by Glean's Work AI Institute with Databricks and Palo Alto Networks, and describe the practical tradeoffs of moving fast while managing risk. The conversation covers agent identity, observability, cultural adoption, CIO/CISO dynamics, and what enterprise-grade AI governance looks like in practice. You'll discover: ✅ Why traditional IAM and observability controls fail in agentic architectures where agents reason, delegate, and act autonomously ✅ How Cvent deliberately encouraged 6,000 agent creations to build AI fluency before layering in moderation and metrics ✅ The AWARE framework's five pillars: identity, context, guardrails, risk scoring, and ecosystem observability ✅ Why "risk is too high" is never the final answer, only "risk is too high for now" ✅ How Cvent filters AI demand through ROI gates before projects reach security review ✅ Why replacing gut-feel security objections with shared…

People in this episode

Host: Michael Krigsman

Guests: Pradeep Mannakkara, Ben Mayrides

Topics covered

• AI governance
• agent identity
• observability
• CIO/CISO dynamics
• risk management
• enterprise AI

Keywords

• AI agents
• governance
• risk scoring
• observability controls
• CIO
• CISO
• enterprise-grade AI
• AWARE framework
• Cvent
• Glean

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cvent, Glean, Databricks, Palo Alto Networks

Books & works: AWARE framework

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