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APRIL 18, 2026
Microsoft's four-question test for AI steering committees - what agents exist, who owns them, what data they touch, how they behave - is now the benchmark CISOs will be measured against.
Microsoft published an AI observability checklist for enterprise steering committees on April 16, 2026 via the Microsoft Cloud Blog, authored by Alym Rayani, VP of Marketing for Microsoft Security. The post frames observability as the foundational prerequisite for scaling enterprise AI in 2026 and introduces a refreshed version of Microsoft's governance guide, adding observability as a new pillar. The checklist identifies four questions every steering committee must be able to answer: what agents currently exist across the environment, who owns them, what data and systems they touch, and how they behave. Accenture is cited as a case study, having deployed over 75 AI use cases across industries with 16 in production after implementing centralized observability, reducing AI application build time by 50%.
GOVERNANCE IMPLICATION
The four observability questions Microsoft poses to steering committees are not aspirational. They are the minimum baseline an examiner will use to determine whether an organization has demonstrated governance intent. An organization that cannot answer all four has not governed its AI estate — it has documented its governance gap. For regulated organizations, the distinction between 'we are working on observability' and 'we can answer these four questions today' is the difference between a finding and a recommendation in the next examination cycle.
SCENARIO
A regional bank's CEO reads the Microsoft observability checklist in April 2026 and forwards it to the CISO with the question: can we answer these? The CISO convenes a working group. Three weeks later, the group reports the bank can definitively answer question one for IT-sanctioned agents but cannot answer questions two, three, or four for the 23 agents built by business lines in Copilot Studio. The CEO asks what it would take to get to full coverage. The answer is six months and a formal agent governance program. The next OCC examination is in four months.
THE GOVERNANCE QUESTION
If a steering committee cannot answer who owns each agent, what data it touches, and how it behaves, has the organization made an active governance decision or a passive one — and does that distinction change its regulatory exposure?
CONTROL GAP
Steering committees have governance responsibility for enterprise AI but typically lack the technical observability infrastructure to exercise it. Accountability without visibility is a governance structure in name only.
REGULATORY RELEVANCE
OCC
FFIEC
FINRA
NIST Ai RMF
SEC Cyber
PRIMARY SOURCE
Your AI steering committee's 2026 checklist: Observability
Alym Rayani
April 16, 2026
Read the primary source →(opens in new tab)CONTINUE READING
FEBRUARY 12, 2026
AgentsMicrosoft Security Insider published findings from first-party telemetry showing that more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies are deploying active agents built with low-code or no-code tools, based on the last 28 days of November 2025. A separate survey of 1,725 data security professionals found that 29% of employees are already using unsanctioned AI agents for work tasks, while only 47% of organizations have implemented specific GenAI security controls. The report introduces Agent 365 as Microsoft's unified control plane for managing AI agents enterprise-wide. Vasu Jakkal, CVP of Microsoft Security, is quoted on applying Zero Trust principles to AI agents. The report identifies the observability gap as the foundational risk: organizations cannot govern what they cannot see.
MARCH 11, 2026
AgentsMicrosoft announced on March 9, 2026 via its Security Blog that Agent 365 will be generally available on May 1, 2026, priced at $15 per user per month. Agent 365 is the unified control plane for managing AI agents across the enterprise, providing IT and security teams with visibility and tools to observe, secure, and govern agents at scale. It is bundled with Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite - a new licensing tier priced at $99 per user per month that combines Microsoft 365 Copilot, Agent 365, Microsoft Entra Suite, and Microsoft 365 E5 with advanced Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview capabilities. Vasu Jakkal, CVP of Microsoft Security, authored the announcement and positioned Agent 365 as the enterprise response to the agent governance gap.
APRIL 9, 2026
ComplianceNIST released a concept note on April 7, 2026 for an AI RMF Profile on Trustworthy AI in Critical Infrastructure, published on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework page at nist.gov. The profile is intended to guide critical infrastructure operators toward specific risk management practices when engaging AI-enabled capabilities. This represents the first sector-specific extension of the NIST AI RMF 1.0, originally published in January 2023, beyond the 2024 Generative AI Profile that extended coverage to LLMs and agentic systems. Public feedback on the concept note is being solicited.