The OODAcon 2025 panel “From Automation to Autonomy: Navigating the Next Wave of AI Agents,” led by experts Josh Devon, Thomas Quinn, David Ginn, Josh Ray, and Andy Black, will confront a defining question for enterprise leaders: how to operate (and secure) organizations run by autonomous AI agents.

In support of this panel, this post serves as your curated map to OODA Network conversations and OODA Loop’s research and original analysis on the promise, peril, and operational realities of Agentic AI.

Why This Matters

Agentic AI marks a turning point for digital operations: enterprises that treat autonomy as a strategic priority (not an R&D experiment) will define the future of decision advantage. OODAcon 2025 will help leaders prepare for that reality.

Enterprises are already integrating AI into workflows, but Agentic AI introduces self-directed decision-making, emergent behavior, and new attack surfaces with real-world business consequences. This shift requires a radical rethink of cybersecurity, governance, and organizational design to maintain competitive advantage.

Key Points

Persona-based AI and emerging agentic architectures demand new enterprise skill models and organizational redesign.

• Agentic AI is not just automation: these systems learn, coordinate, and act autonomously in complex environments.
• This evolution mirrors the rise of cloud and internet ecosystems, but with far higher operational, regulatory, and security stakes.
• Agentic AI introduces a new cybersecurity attack surface, requiring new governance models and red-teaming approaches.
• Enterprises must balance innovation with systemic risk using structured frameworks such as NIST CSF and Cyber Kill Chain.
• Leading experts at OODAcon 2025 (Josh Devon, Thomas Quinn, David Ginn, Josh Ray, Andy Black) will provide strategic foresight to guide enterprise adoption.

What Next?

Organizations equipped to anticipate emergent behavior will secure outsized strategic advantage.

Enterprise leaders should prepare now for the pivot to autonomy – where:

• Agent coordination drives mission outcomes
• Attackers also weaponize autonomy
• Governance and auditability become board-level priorities
• Strategic foresight replaces compliance-only adoption

Organizations equipped to anticipate emergent behavior will secure outsized strategic advantage.

OODA Loop Resources: Operationalizing and Securing Enterprise Agentic AI

Curated, themed references to support enterprise leaders navigating Agentic AI (with URL-linked titles and concise summaries). Prepared for OODAcon 2025 panel context: “From Automation to Autonomy: Navigating the Next Wave of AI Agents.”

Agentic AI Foundations & Architectures

• Agentic AI: AI Agents and Persona-based AI Will Transform Enterprise Compute: Explains how autonomous, persona-driven agents will reshape enterprise compute models, workflows, and decision-making.
• Software’s Agentic Future: How AI is Rewriting the Rules of Code: Explores how coding agents and AI-assisted development alter software lifecycle, velocity, and reliability.
• The Agentic Mesh Architecture: Building the Next Layer of Intelligent Infrastructure: Introduces a networked architecture for coordinating many agents safely across enterprise boundaries.
• Evolving AI Architectures: IBM and Anthropic Advance Secure Enterprise AI with Model Content Protocol: Details how MCP-based patterns improve interoperability, control, and guardrails for enterprise AI.
• Operationalizing Enterprise AI: Architecture Churn, Emergent Behaviors, and Strategic Foresight: A playbook for delivering production AI amid shifting stacks, emergent system behavior, and governance demands.
• Training for the Long Haul: AI Coding Agents in Complex Environments: Discusses durable training methods for agents operating over extended tasks with delayed rewards.
• Touching the Void: Persona-Based AI and the New Age of Expertise: Examines persona-centric agents, knowledge capture, and the changing shape of expertise in organizations.
• AI Agents: Pioneering Autonomy and Navigating Complex Challenges: Overview of agent capabilities, orchestration, and practical challenges in real-world deployments.

Governance, Risk, Red Teaming & Safety

• Agentic AI Red Teaming: The Cloud Security Alliance on Testing Autonomy at Scale: Summarizes CSA guidance for exercising, evaluating, and hardening autonomous systems in realistic environments.
• Charting the Evolution of AI Red-Teaming Through a Cybersecurity Lens: Tracks how AI red-teaming matured from prompt fiddling to rigorous, system-level adversarial testing.
• Building the Backbone of AI Safety: A Strategic Framework for Mandatory Incident Reporting: Proposes incident reporting standards and feedback loops essential for sector-wide learning and accountability.
• Reducing Agentic AI Risk in the Enterprise: A Playbook for Corporate Leaders: Actionable risk-reduction measures: governance patterns, oversight models, and phased deployment strategies.
• Enterprise Task Audits to Identify “LLM-Ready” Functions Across Business Units: Methodology to inventory and prioritize tasks that benefit most from LLMs and agents.
• When AI Becomes a Material Risk Class: What the S&P 500’s AI Disclosures Reveal About Executive Risk Perception: Analyzes public filings to show how boards now classify AI as an enterprise risk and opportunity.
• Anatomy of a Prompt Injection: The PromptLock Case Study: Deep dive on a real prompt-injection incident, tracing failures and defense-in-depth countermeasures.

Startup Ecosystem & Convergence

• Cybersecurity and AI Convergence: A Startup Ecosystem Playbook (Agentic AI, LLM Threats, and Red-Teaming at Scale): Guidance for founders and investors building at the AI–cyber nexus with practical go-to-market ideas.
• Cybersecurity and Blockchain Convergence: Strategic Opportunities for Startups and Investors at Black Hat 2025: Identifies opportunities where blockchain primitives complement AI-era cybersecurity solutions.

Cyber Threats, Adversaries & Geopolitics

• AI-Powered Ransomware Emerges as a Force Multiplier, Exploiting LLMs for Scale and Speed: Explains how adversaries use LLMs to accelerate reconnaissance, payload generation, and negotiations.
• A New Wave of Cyberattackers Enabled by Adversarial Use of LLMs and Agentic AI: Profiles emerging attacker tradecraft that leverages autonomous agents for end-to-end intrusion pipelines.
• Russia and China Escalate Cyber Targeting of Global Infrastructure: Assesses state-aligned campaigns against critical infrastructure and their strategic objectives.
• U.S. Strike-First Cyber Deterrence Risks Increased Weaponization of Cyberspace: Weighs the policy consequences of preemptive cyber operations in an era of ubiquitous AI tooling.
• Weaponized Code, Unregulated Coins, and Compliance Convergence: A 2025 Cyber and Crypto Threat Vector Review: Synthesizes cybercrime monetization trends and the regulatory responses, closing the loop on illicit finance.
• Countering Adversaries and How to Count It: Offers a measurement framework for evaluating the impact of counter-adversary operations.
• Does China Have Strategic Dominance over the Global IT Supply Chain?: Explores dependencies and leverage points in global tech manufacturing and logistics.
• CISA’s Sunset: The State of Government-Private Sector Info Sharing: Analyzes information-sharing challenges and policy shifts affecting public-private cyber coordination.
• The Perils of Precedent: Could Google’s Disruption Unit Invite Foreign Retaliation?: Considers geopolitical blowback risks from aggressive private-sector counter-disruption operations.

Offensive AI, Competitions & Lessons Learned

• Lessons Learned about Offensive AI: The DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) and Team Atlanta’s Victory: Extracts practical takeaways from AIxCC on autonomous vulnerability discovery and defense automation.

Strategy, Foresight & Enterprise Operations

• AI as a Defense Multiplier and Attack Amplifier: Strategic Imperatives for 2025: Outlines strategic moves for leaders facing simultaneous AI-enabled offensive and defensive shifts.
• Eric Schmidt Warns: AI Workflows Are Redefining Command and Advantage: Highlights operational doctrine changes as AI-driven workflows rewire command-and-control.
• The August 2025 OODA Network Monthly Meeting: Enterprise IT Convergence (Cyber and AI), Policy, Geopolitics, and Organizational Futures: Captures community insights on converging cyber/AI agendas and governance challenges.
• The September 2025 OODA Network Member Meeting: Navigating Agentic AI, Security, and Governance: Recaps member discussions on agentic architectures, policy headwinds, and security priorities.
• Ongoing Lessons from the 2024 CrowdStrike Outage: Harmonization and the Strategic Risk Lens: Frames a major outage as a case study in systemic risk, harmonization, and resilience planning.
• OODA Weekly Dispatch: Agentic AI Security, OODAcon Update, and Geopolitical Overview: Weekly situational awareness: agentic AI security themes, OODAcon developments, and geopolitics.
• OODA Weekly Dispatch: Expanding Threat Models, Agentic AI, And OODAcon is Coming: Highlights expanding enterprise threat models with a pre-OODAcon focus on autonomy.
• OODA Weekly Dispatch: Agentic AI, AI Natives, and OODAcon: Tracks the emergence of ‘AI-native’ organizations and their competitive behaviors.
• OODA Weekly Dispatch: A Strategy for Finding Tech at RSA, Agentic AI for Cyber, Coming OODA Events: Curated RSA strategy notes with an emphasis on agentic AI tooling for defenders.

Agentic AI marks a turning point for digital operations: enterprises that treat autonomy as a strategic priority — not an R&D experiment — will define the future of decision advantage. OODAcon 2025 will help leaders prepare for that reality.