The IT Therapist: The Coworker Who Never Sleeps

Your CTO just announced that every team is getting an "AI coworker"—autonomous software agents that read tickets, call APIs, run scripts, and talk to production systems on their own. To stay safe, you turn on human-in-the-loop approval. Now you are clicking "Approve" 140 times a day without time to read what you are signing, and your name is on every log. You don't have a steering wheel; you've been handed a rubber stamp.

In Book 4 of The IT Therapist series, exhausted IT operations head Adel sits down for four sessions with Dr. Karim Nassar—and a rubber duck in tiny reading glasses—to untangle the real-world risks of autonomous AI agents. Stripping away both sci-fi doomsday myths and vendor marketing hype, this illustrated business fable translates recent security research, human-factors psychology, and emerging AI law into a practical blueprint for engineering leaders.

Across four structured sessions, you will learn how to: • Defend against indirect prompt injection: Understand why natural-language system prompts are "polite signs on unlocked doors" and how hidden instructions in everyday emails or tickets can hijack an agent's goals. • Enforce Least Privilege and Least Agency: Replace shared human credentials and soft instructions with dedicated agent identities, short-lived keys, hard platform guardrails, and tested kill switches. • Escape the "Moral Crumple Zone": Overcome automation bias and vigilance decay by replacing 100% rubber-stamp approvals with targeted friction, speed bumps on irreversible actions, and cognitive scaffolding. • Navigate legal liability and team trust: Prepare for emerging regulatory mandates and court precedents where "the AI did it" is no longer a defense, while protecting your team from algorithmic burnout and skill erosion.

Complete with session homework, evidence-graded summary tables ("Bolted Down," "Probably," "Depends Who's Talking," and "Still Arguing"), a 15-page visual slide companion, and a ready-to-use One-Page AI Coworker Charter, The Coworker Who Never Sleeps is an essential field guide for IT managers, CISOs, developers, and leaders who want to stay in control when the machines start working on their own.