Is Your AI Agent an Employee Nobody Is Managing? with T.J. Marlin

About this episode

T.J. Marlin spent most of his career investigating corporate crises — the kind that end up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal — and the pattern he found was not the one people expect. Across those global investigations, the overwhelming majority of the harm was not caused by external attackers. It was caused by helpful employees who did not know better, making assumptions nobody could see. Now CEO of Guardrail Technologies, he argues an AI agent is exactly that employee: a junior hire with no training, making real decisions on loans, power and infrastructure, who nobody would dream of onboarding with "never show me your work and do whatever you want." Jonathan Green talks with him about why mobile is the wild west, why MCP servers deserve the same scrutiny as any supplier, and the uncomfortable fact that you cannot train people to care about security — but you can constrain an agent. Key Takeaways: • An agent is a digital employee making decisions, not a process running a script. Your physical staff have an org chart, a job description and someone accountable for them. By default, agents have none of that — so nobody can say who let this one in the front door, or what ca