​Before Deploying Agentic AI In A Regulated Industry, Draw The Boundary Lines First

Anthony Spadaro is the founder and CEO of Vantomic Inc., an agency building agentic AI software for nuclear power and energy operations.

Many of my projects involve building agentic AI systems for companies operating in heavily regulated industries, like nuclear power. In early 2026, I also took a course on deploying agentic AI for executives to better understand whether there’s a gap between the teachings and my own experience.

One lesson has become clear: in a regulated industry, the value of an AI agent isn’t based primarily on what the model can do, but on how the company sets the boundary lines. I’ll discuss what that looks like in practice, and the first thing I’d do if I were charged with introducing AI agents in an environment where a failure is a reportable incident instead of a bad quarterly earnings report.

Think of the agent as a boundary, not a capability.

Every single agentic system I’ve built boils down to five considerations:

1. What can the agent observe?

2. What actions can it perform?

3. How does it plan?

4. What can it remember?

5. How is safety enforced around it?

Vendors often showcase only the first three. Safety teams and regulators are interested in all five, and in my experience, the last two are typically underdeveloped.

For nuclear, this approach is liberating. No one will let an agent control a safety system, nor should they. But an agent that can only read facility documents, check them against regulatory obligations, generate a compliance document and send it to a licensed individual is quite different from the Hollywood depiction. The issue changes from “Can we trust AI?” to “What precisely can this system observe and do, and can we demonstrate that?”

Nuclear companies already understand how to do that. They’ve been drawing boundaries around equipment and personnel for years. A good first step is to draft these five considerations on one sheet before any programming happens, with the “prohibited” list exceeding the “permitted” list.