The platform
The Mandate Engine
The accountability layer for your AI agents. It sets how each agent shares the work with your people, puts consequential decisions in front of the right people, and keeps a record of who owns every action.
Four things every governed agent needs
Mandates
Define what each agent is allowed to do, at what level of responsibility, and on whose authority.
Approvals
Consequential actions go to the accountable person for a decision before they happen.
Ownership record
Every consequential action is recorded with its triggering signal, the rule applied, and the person who owns it.
Governed Action Rate
One number for leadership: the share of observed, in-scope consequential actions that meet your governance requirements, read alongside governance coverage.
Decide how people and agents share the work
Every agent starts as a new member of the team and earns more responsibility over time.
- Observe: the agent watches and reports to a person.
- Recommend: the agent suggests and a person decides.
- Draft: the agent prepares the work and a person approves it.
- Act: the agent carries out work a person has already authorized.
The most important decisions always stay with a person.
Mandate · how the work is shared
What counts as a consequential action
Not every agent action needs a person. The ones that do share four traits. They reach a customer, spend money, change a system of record, or speak for the company. Everything else can go ahead within its mandate.
See the glossary for definitions of every term.
Illustrative example
A budget shift that had an owner before it happened
A paid media agent sees cost per opportunity rising on one channel and drafts a plan to move $40,000 of monthly budget to another. Its mandate allows it to recommend budget changes, not make them. The recommendation goes to the Director of Paid Media, who approves half the shift for a two-week test.
- Signal
- Rising cost per opportunity on one channel
- Mandate
- Recommend only for budget changes
- Decision
- Approved $20,000 shift for two weeks
- Owner
- Director of Paid Media
One accountability layer. Many agents and systems.
Your teams are introducing AI agents across marketing tools, CRM platforms, service applications, and internal workflows. Each tool can be useful on its own. The harder question is who authorizes consequential work as several agents contribute to one outcome.
The Mandate Engine is being designed to bring a consistent approach to delegated authority and human accountability across that environment. People set mandates. Agents do the work within their assigned boundaries. Decisions that require judgment reach the right owner, and the resulting action retains a clear accountability record.
The goal is to let organizations adopt the AI tools that make sense for them while maintaining a shared standard for the work that matters.
Illustrative product concept
Awaiting owner decision- Mandate
- Customer-facing product launch communications
- Accountable owner
- Director of Product Marketing
- Participating agent
- Campaign Content Agent
- Responsibility level
- Draft
- Allowed work
- Prepare email copy and recommendations
- Decision boundary
- Human approval before send
- Proposed action
- Send launch message to 40,000 customers
- Decision context
- Feature claim flagged for review
Accountability record
- Mandate
- Review
- Approval
- Action
- Owner
Agent builders help teams create AI agents. Workflow tools coordinate tasks. Monitoring tools help teams see what happened. RealMandates focuses on the business authority behind consequential agent actions and the person accountable for the result. These functions can overlap with other tools; our focus is making the ownership question operational.
What The Mandate Engine is not
Not an agent builder.
Build agents wherever your teams prefer.
Not a language model.
It works with the AI you already use.
Not an after-the-fact audit.
Accountability is settled before the action, not in a quarterly review.
Help shape The Mandate Engine
We are inviting qualified design partners to help shape The Mandate Engine. The platform is under development, and the first access opportunities will depend on product readiness and program fit.
What you get
- Early access opportunities as development progresses
- Direct influence on the roadmap
- Working sessions with Mark Tack
- Preferred commercial consideration at launch
What we ask
- An executive sponsor
- One AI agent use case to govern
- A short feedback session each month