Toward a Governable Architecture for Agentic Enterprises - A domain independent framework spanning digital workflows and embodied systems

Toward a Governable Architecture for Agentic Enterprises - A domain independent framework spanning digital workflows and embodied systems proposes a domain independent architectural backbone for making agent autonomy scalable without making oversight structurally infeasible. It reframes governance as an enforceable runtime property rather than a primarily procedural afterthought, grounded in distributed systems constraints, human cognitive limits, and security first principles. The paper defines a small set of stable runtime primitives, including agent identity and authority, policy evaluation and enforcement, provenance and traceability, risk adaptive supervision, monitoring, and containment mechanisms for fault and misuse propagation. It then organizes these primitives into a portable reference architecture and illustrates operational consequences through worked scenarios of failure propagation and successful containment under partial failure and adversarial pressure.