Governing Technical Debt in Agentic AI Systems

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 27 May 2026] Governing Technical Debt in Agentic AI Systems Muhammad Zia Hydari, Raja Iqbal, Narayan Ramasubbu Agentic AI systems are increasingly being explored as production infrastructure: they reason over multiple steps, call tools, act through workflows, and adapt through memory and feedback. These systems create governance challenges that are not fully captured by traditional software or predictive ML technical debt. We define Agentic Technical Debt as the accumulated liability created when prompts, memory, tool schemas, orchestration graphs, control policies, and observability routines are patched together faster than they can be validated, standardized, and governed. We define Stochastic Tax as the recurring operating burden of keeping probabilistic agent behavior within acceptable bounds. The distinction matters: debt is a stock of design and governance liability, while the tax is a flow of operating cost that arises because stochastic agents act through tools and workflows. We outline how managers can make both visible through lightweight dashboards and governance controls. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); General Economics (econ.GN) Cite as: arXiv:2605.29129 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.29129v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.29129 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Muhammad Zia Hydari [view email] [v1] Wed, 27 May 2026 21:42:49 UTC (9 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY econ econ.GN q-fin q-fin.EC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)