Most talk about agent permissions is about what could go wrong. I find it more useful to ask what you will have to say afterwards.

Picture a hypothetical internal workflow. An assistant reads support tickets and drafts a weekly summary for the team lead. It works well. Then someone widens its access "to make it more useful." Now it can read the whole shared drive and send email.

Nothing bad has happened yet. But if something does, you are the one explaining it.

What the explanation looks like

Suppose the summary one week includes a line from a salary spreadsheet. The agent was allowed to read it, so it did. Now you have to answer a few plain questions:

Why could it see that file?

Who decided it should?

How do we know it did not send anything?

If the honest answer to each is "it had access to everything, so we can't say," that is the cost. The time goes into reconstructing events, not into fixing a bug.

A smaller version of the same workflow

Compare it with a narrower setup, also hypothetical.…