The Job Description No One Has Written

Every new employee at a Swiss bank gets a job description. Scope of authority. Reporting line. Performance criteria. Escalation path. It is boring, bureaucratic, and essential.

Every AI agent deployed at the same bank gets a configuration file.

The gap between those two documents is where most governance failures will originate.

A job description forces clarity. What is this agent authorised to decide? What must it refer upward? What does good performance look like, measured how, reviewed when? Who is its manager, and what does that manager need to understand about how it works?

A configuration file answers none of these questions. It specifies inputs, outputs, and technical parameters. It lives in a repository that the business unit has never opened.

FINMA Guidance 08/2024 requires that accountability for AI decisions cannot be delegated. In practice, that means someone in the business must own each agent's decisions the way a team lead owns their team's output. Try asking a head of operations which agents report to them. Most cannot answer.

The fix is unglamorous. Write the job description. One page. Scope. Authority limits. Escalation triggers. Performance metrics. Named owner. Review cycle.

The banks that do this for their first ten agents will have a governance framework. The banks that skip it will have a compliance problem they discover during an audit.

The document already exists in every HR system. Adapt it.