The agent governance landscape in 2026
The category is young and the names blur. Below: a split into layers, examples in each, and an honest placement of ourselves, an internal alpha from Poland with no commercial customers.
What layers actually exist?
Four, and confusing them is the most common source of misunderstanding when choosing a tool. Each answers a different question.
- Orchestration: who does the work and in what order. Workflow tools and agent platforms live here.
- Observability: what happened. Run traces, evaluations, annotation queues.
- Oversight and policy: what may execute and what needs consent. This is where Gorgos sits.
- Governance and compliance: documentation, risk registers, organisation-level regulatory reporting.
Who operates in each?
These examples are for orientation, not judgement. Prices appear only where they are public.
- Orchestration: n8n, Make, Zapier, cloud vendors' agent platforms.
- Observability: LangSmith, Langfuse, run-tracing and evaluation tooling.
- Agent oversight in large organisations: Microsoft Agent 365, Zenity, Arthur.
- Governance and compliance: Credo AI, Holistic AI, FairNow.
Where does Gorgos sit?
In the third layer, and only there. Gorgos does not replace an orchestration tool or a risk documentation system. It answers what an agent may do alone and what needs a signature, and leaves a trace of that.
The honest placement: an internal alpha running in one company, ours. We have no commercial Gorgos customers and no Gorgos revenue. The vendors above have both.
If you need a finished, supported product today, buy from the list above. If you want the audit trail to exist before the agents do, that is the order we build in.