Brex monitors AI agents' network activity to manage risk

Brex’s CEO Pedro Franceschi has laid out a new approach to safely running AI agents inside big companies. At the VB Transform 2026 conference, he argued that the industry should stop calling them “agents” and start thinking of them as virtual employees with Slack logins, email addresses and meeting invites. The idea is to treat each AI like a new hire that can sit in on calls, read documents and answer internal messages—without the usual code-level scrutiny.

Franceschi says most companies still police AI by scanning its code, but that misses the point once the system starts acting on live data. Brex’s solution is to watch what the AI actually does on the network instead of what it could do on paper. By giving OpenClaw, an open-source AI framework, real internal roles and monitoring its every move, Brex found it could keep the benefits of automation without the usual security headaches.

The company now runs OpenClaw in a handful of pilot roles, watching for unusual file access or messages that fall outside its assigned duties. Early results show fewer false alarms than traditional code scans and faster onboarding of new AI helpers. Franceschi insists the shift from “agent” to “virtual employee” is more than semantics—it forces clearer rules about what each AI is allowed to touch and when.

If the pilot scales, Brex plans to publish its security playbook so other firms can adopt the same network-first approach. The stakes are high: companies that treat every AI like a new colleague will move faster, but only if they can prove to regulators and auditors that the bots are behaving themselves. Franceschi reckons the next wave of enterprise AI will succeed or fail on trust, and monitoring the network—not the code—is how you earn it.