Citi, Ford, and Experian share their strategies for scaling AI agents

“To be able to trust, you need to be able to see what is happening.” This seemingly simple maxim is at the heart of today’s AI rollouts across the business landscape, according to Laura Heisman, the chief marketing officer of Dynatrace.

“That’s probably the biggest conversation that everybody is having across all industries. We hear it from our customers every day,” Heisman said recently on a panel at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference. “The big question is, can you trust it? Is it right? And if it’s wrong, can you stop it?”

As businesses contemplate letting AI agents chain together sequences of tasks, each based on the output of AI models, trust is more important than ever. And the only way to build that trust, according to Heisman and other business leaders on the panel, is to build visibility and control into systems. 

“For us visibility, traceability, is not optional, it is foundational. It is how we look at every decision,” said Nikhil Joshi, the chief information officer in the markets division at Citi, the financial giant that moves trillions of dollars every day across more than 100 countries

Citi spent much of 2024 building a centralized technological foundation for all its apps and agents, Joshi said. That foundation has made the company much more comfortable bringing agents into production. 

“There’s only one single way to de...