Hoang Vu, Maximilian Körner, Adrian Rebmann +4cs.AI cs.SE
As organizations increasingly deploy generative AI agents to automate business processes, they face a governance dilemma: although these agents can increase operational flexibility, their non-deterministic nature challenges the control and standardization that Business Process Management seeks to enforce. This paper addresses this \emph{invisible autonomy risk} by introducing \emph{Agent Behavior Mining}, a governance capability that enables the application of process mining techniques to render generative AI agent decision-making observable and traceable. We (1) improve the understanding of generative AI agent behavior through an event data model that translates granular agent activities -- including reasoning traces, tool usage, and token costs -- into standardized process logs; (2) instantiate the data model in a multi-agent order-to-cash implementation, demonstrating how process managers can leverage agent logs to detect policy deviations and quantify operational variability; and (3) evaluate the perceived practical utility of the approach in an exploratory study with 18 industry practitioners. The results indicate that practitioners view behavioral transparency as a prerequisite for trust and consider the ability to examine agent reasoning as an important governance requirement for the next generation of AI-driven business processes.
This study proposes the Behavioral Protocol Framework (BPF), an entropy-controlled pluralistic alignment framework designed to address two critical challenges in autonomous agent economies: the hivemind effect arising from excessive strategic convergence among agents and the lack of transparency in autonomous decision-making processes. The proposed BPF consists of three core modules: Mentalizing-based Social Intelligence (MbSI) grounded in Theory of Mind (ToM), Pluralistic Alignment (PA), and a Verifiable Execution Kernel (VEK). These modules are organically integrated within a closed-loop architecture that governs the entire lifecycle of agent behavior, from decision-making and execution to verification and feedback. To evaluate the proposed framework, a simulation environment implemented in Python and a Streamlit-based user interface will be developed. Through empirical experimentation, the study aims to examine whether the entropy-control mechanism of the PA module can effectively preserve strategic diversity among agents and mitigate collective convergence, while the VEK module provides a comprehensive and transparent audit trail of the decision-making process. The anticipated results are expected to demonstrate that the proposed framework can simultaneously enhance the stability, efficiency, and trustworthiness of autonomous agent economies. Consequently, this research offers a practical approach for developing robust, transparent, and accountable agent-native economic systems.