The AI Execution Control Plane: Restoring Human Authority, Determinism, and Auditability in AI-Driven Systems

AI systems are increasingly embedded in operational workflows across software delivery, incident response, finance, compliance, and customer operations. While models and agent frameworks have advanced rapidly, execution governance has not kept pace. Human oversight exists today, but largely as informal behavior like reviews, messages, and checklists, rather than as enforceable system guarantees. This paper argues that scalable, accountable AI adoption requires a distinct infrastructure layer: an AI Execution Control Plane. This layer formalizes when AI-assisted execution must pause, when human authority is required, how decisions are enforced, and how execution history is recorded and replayed. The paper defines the execution-time governance problem, explains why existing approaches fail structurally, and proposes a vendor-neutral reference model for execution authority in AI-assisted systems.