Decision Rights in the Age of AI Agents: Who Decides What, and How That Answer Is Changing

Decision rights are the governance layer of the AI operating model, and most enterprises have not defined them. Sixty percent of executives use AI to support decisions, Gartner projects half of all business decisions will be augmented or automated by agents by 2027, yet only 5 percent of organizations say they manage AI-augmented decision-making well. The result is two failure modes: approval theater, where humans review every AI recommendation and negate the speed advantage, and ungoverned autonomy, where agents make decisions outside their authority and the organization discovers the problem after an incident. This article, the third in a six-part series on the AI operating model gap, presents a decision authority framework (Tier 1: agent acts freely, Tier 2: agent recommends and human decides, Tier 3: human only), extends it to multi-agent systems, and addresses the accountability question that most organizations have not answered: when an agent makes a bad decision, who is responsible?