Parents of young children face a lot of fears about developmental milestones, from infancy through adulthood. The number of months it takes a baby to learn to talk or walk is often used as a benchmark for wellness, or an indicator of additional tests needed to properly diagnose a potential health condition. A parent rejoices over the child’s first steps and then realizes how much has changed when the child can quickly walk outside, instead of slowly crawling in a safe area inside. Suddenly safety, including childproofing, takes a completely different lens and approach.

Generative AI hit toddlerhood between December 2025 and January 2026 with the introduction of no code tools from multiple vendors and the debut of OpenClaw, an open source personal agent posted on GitHub. No more crawling on the carpet—the generative AI tech baby broke into a sprint, and very few governance principles were operationally prepared.

The accountability challenge: It’s not them, it’s you

Until now, governance has been focused on model output risks with humans in the loop before consequential decisions were made—such as with loan approvals or job applications. Model behavior, including drift, alignment, data exfiltration, and poisoning, was the focus. The pace was set by a human prompting a model in a chatbot format with plenty of back and forth interactions between machine and human.

Today, with autonomous agents operating in complex workflows, the vision and the benefits of applied AI require significantly fewer humans in the loop. The point is to operate a business at machine pace by automating manual tasks that have clear architecture and decision rules. The goal, from a liability standpoint, is no reduction in enterprise or business risk between a machine operating a workflow and a human operating a workflow. CX Today summarizes the situation succinctly: “AI does the work, humans own the risk,” and   California state law (AB 316), went into effect January 1, 2026, which removes the “AI did it; I didn’t approve it” excuse.  This is similar to parenting when an adult is held responsible for a child’s actions that negatively impacts the larger communit...