Michael Rishi Forrester

Forrester’s professional biography describes nearly three decades across operations, cloud and platform engineering, including Red Hat, ThoughtWorks, AWS and KodeKloud. At Accenture LearnVantage, he works on forward-deployed engineer training and enterprise AI adoption. The current focus goes beyond teaching a tool: it includes the organizational and operating changes needed when agents begin carrying out engineering work. His public identity uses Rishi as his middle name.[1][2]

In Build a Platform and Watch It Burn, Forrester and Whitney Lee let participants attack a deliberately permissive burrito-ordering agent connected to Kubernetes. The workshop contrasts prompt-based refusals with admission policy that can reject a deployment even when the model proposes it. It also examines input filtering, output filtering and traces of tool calls. The demonstrations expose different intervention points and their limits; a successful filter in one path does not prove that every route to the underlying action is blocked.[3]

Agentic Covenants frames agent safety as a relationship between permission, responsibility and controls outside the model’s own instructions. The approach places architectural constraints around what an autonomous system can do. For a platform engineer, that means evaluating identity, network reach, deployment policy and evidence of actions alongside the quality of the generated answer.[4]