For decades, the IT operations manual was a dense, 50-page PDF — a document designed by humans, for humans, and usually destined to gather digital dust until an audit required its retrieval. But as we enter 2026, the traditional standard operating procedure (SOP) is officially on life support. Humans are no longer the primary users of their own manuals.
Our systems are becoming agentic, deploying autonomous agents that don’t just monitor dashboards but actively “think,” plan, and execute changes within our infrastructure. These agents cannot read a PDF, nor can they “interpret the spirit” of a security policy written in legalese. If you want to maintain control in an era of autonomous IT, you must move beyond static guardrails and adopt an Agentic Constitution, which is the enterprise application of Constitutional AI, a term pioneered by Anthropic.
From policy on paper to policy as code
In the past, IT governance was a reactive “check-the-box” exercise. The modern enterprise must shift toward Policy as Code (PaC).
