Business Applications Innovation Summit 2026

AI is integrated into business processes, handling both routine tasks and strategic decisions. However, few organizations have established clear guidelines for AI use. Teams often create their own guardrails independently, with limited visibility into other departments. Automation is advancing faster than teams can document the AI's permitted actions.

Atulpriya Sharma, Principal Developer Advocate and CNCF Ambassador at Improving, introduces a practical framework for creating explicit agreements between business processes and the AI systems that support them. He outlines how to define clear contracts specifying spend limits, operational context, and scope of authority. These foundational guardrails help maintain consistency as AI is deployed across teams. Discover how these agreements can enable confident, controlled, and aligned AI adoption.

Topics for discussion include:
- Define the essential terms of an AI contract: spend limits, operational context, and permission boundaries.
- Understand fragmented guardrails as a platform governance issue, rather than a training problem.
- Identify the inflection point where scaling AI exposes governance breakdowns—and learn how to detect it early.
- A short set of questions to ask your teams this week to find out if you already have a duplication problem hiding in plain sight.