"Every enterprise now runs AI agents nobody owns. They keep executing long after the business need that created them is gone. We call them digital zombies. Governance is not a compliance checkbox. It is the line between an agent that serves the business and one that quietly outlives its purpose."

Dr. Estera Kot is CTO at Clouds on Mars and a former Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, where she owned the Apache Spark runtime across Azure Synapse Analytics and Microsoft Fabric. She created the Native Execution Engine, four times faster than open-source Spark, and migrated 25,000 customers to Fabric. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science with distinction, a U.S. patent, and fifteen peer-reviewed papers. She lectures at UCLA and ranks among Poland's Top 100 Women in AI.