Agentic AI
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Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
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Identity & Access Management

Hitachi Digital Services CTO Balasubramanian on Governing AI at Scale

Jennifer Lawinski •
June 15, 2026    

Prem Balasubramanian, CTO and head of AI, Hitachi Digital Services

As artificial intelligence evolves from a productivity tool into a system capable of making decisions and taking action, enterprises are confronting a new challenge: how to govern and scale agentic AI in production environments.

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Prem Balasubramanian, CTO and head of AI, Hitachi Digital Services, said organizations must move beyond viewing AI as a chatbot and begin treating it as an operational system responsible for delivering business outcomes.

Balasubramanian calls it as a fundamental transformation in how enterprises operate. Rather than simply augmenting employees, AI is increasingly being used to automate workflows, resolve incidents, support engineering functions and execute business processes with limited human intervention. “AI is moving from being a productivity tool to becoming a system of execution,” Balasubramanian said.

That evolution introduces new risks. One of the most pressing is what he calls “agent sprawl” – the rapid proliferation of AI agents across enterprise platforms, business applications and development environments. As organizations deploy agents through SaaS platforms, low-code tools and custom frameworks, many CIOs lose visibility into how many agents are operating, what they can access and how they are interacting with enterprise data.

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, Balasubramanian discussed:

How agentic AI is transforming enterprise operating models;
Why agent sprawl is emerging as a major governance challenge;
How organizations can safely deploy AI in operational and physical environments.

Balasubramanian leads AI initiatives at Hitachi Digital Services including the company’s AI strategy, platform development and enterprise transformation initiatives. He is the architect of the HARC framework, which combines AI agents, governance controls and operational workflows to help organizations deploy reliable, scalable AI systems across IT, cloud, security and industrial environments. Prior to joining HDS, he held senior engineering roles at Cognizant.