An AI agent just emailed a prospect your sales team never approved, in language your marketing team never wrote, referencing a deal stage nobody had reached. That opening is a composite of real launch failures, not one anecdote. It is what happens when the governance layer arrives after the agent does.
The vendors are right: AI SDR agents are the future. But the future arrives safely only when the governance arrives first. Five questions separate the production-ready from the demo.
What may it never do? A constitution, enforced in code, not a policy document.
What are its hard caps? Daily outreach ceilings, enforced automatically, with a human owner who has authority over the prompt, the data, and the budget.
Which learned rules can you veto, and where is that disclosed?
What drift tripwire reverts behavior when the model wanders?
Who owns it at 2am with receipts: what ran in production, what it returned, what it cost.
I run an AI SDR this way. Every message is human-sent. Outreach ceilings are enforced in code. The full checklist, with the vendor-evaluation questions and the Monday-morning version, is on the essay:
https://builder-singh.com/writing/ai-sdr-governance-checklist
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