Monday, September 21, 2026
9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.
Fort Tectoria, 777 Fort Street, Victoria, BC (open in Google Maps)
Free Event
Presented by VIATEC
Host: Robert Cooper on LinkedIn
Featuring: Mike Leslie on LinkedIn
Every AI conference this year runs a version of the same talk: treat your agent like a new hire, with a job description, onboarding and a performance review. Mike Leslie argues the metaphor is itself the problem. Calling something an AI employee rather than an AI tool, in his framing, makes people check its output less carefully and hands accountability to something that cannot hold any. What he puts in its place is scoped, time-limited access instead of one shared key, and an approval model separating what an agent does alone from what needs a signature. Questions follow the presentation. It is one of the lead-up sessions before the Prompt Victoria conference in November.
Anu's Take
Pretty much every story this year about an agent going rogue turns out, on inspection, to be a story about permissions. Not the model misbehaving: a key left somewhere convenient, a token scoped to everything, an approval step nobody added. A talk that spends its time on access architecture rather than prompt craft is aimed at the right half of the problem.
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Published Wednesday, August 26, 2026 by Anu Jolliffe on LinkedIn