The Long Read · Ins7ghts Daily, Saturday 31 October 2026
Years ago I used SQL Server with ActiveX components for things most SQL Server experts do not know are possible, and built browser automation with VBScript inside Access and Excel, before people understood you could do that. It worked, and it was fun, and hacking systems like that is where most of my creativity came from. It also left nothing behind. No record of which cell moved, on whose say, or why. If anyone had asked me a year later to prove what my script did to a number in a report, I could have told them a story. I could not have shown them anything.
This week the industry shipped that same reach with a receipt attached. Microsoft gave Copilot accounting skills in Excel and, with them, an audit trail an accountant starts by hand: the chat history then holds what Copilot changed and why, who made a specific change, and an undo for individual edits that leaves the rest of the workbook alone. For anybody who has spent a career chasing a number backwards through a spreadsheet, that is a good day.
Then look at who else wrote a piece of the same record in the same week, and the picture gets less comfortable.
Cyera, which finds and labels sensitive data, is in talks at around $20 billion, and it agreed to buy Oasis Security for about $1 billion to manage the identity of AI agents. At Cloudera's conference the position on stage was that role-based access control is what decides whether an agent can be trusted. And a long way from either of them, somebody wrote a governance checklist for local government agents: an inventory of use cases, a named owner for each, a unique identity per agent, impact assessments completed before go-live, an incident plan.
Four parties, four different halves of one record. The vendor writes what changed. The security company writes who or what was allowed to change it. The platform writes which role the agent was wearing. The council writes which use cases exist at all. Nobody owns the join, and the join is the only thing an auditor actually wants: this field moved, this agent moved it, under this authority, and here is the independent trace.
That is also why the Cloudera number reads the way it does. Three in four IT leaders say compliance constrains how far they can scale AI, and the same research programme found the public sector leading every industry on governance while data access gaps hold back its AI readiness. Those two findings only look contradictory until you notice they describe the same building: the policy is written, the walls are up, and the wiring between rooms was never run.
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