I would like the AI to decide what it wanted to do then send events containing the forces to achieve it's goals
Is this not a good idea?
If you actually mean physical force then it is not a good idea. Notice the overall complexity of a game. The human approach, especially but not only in software engineering, is to modularize a problem into smaller ones until the parts become (more or less) easy to manage. Further, coupling the parts only when and where meaningful keeps the maintainability of the whole construct.
One of the higher levels in this modularization process is often named "sub-systems". Input processing, graphics rendering, sound rendering, physics simulation, AI, networking, ... are such sub-systems. Each one has its task. You should not mix them up. It is okay if some sub-systems use the output of other sub-systems to fulfill their own task (this is the said coupling), but each sub-system has its own responsibilities.
Creating physical force is not the responsibility of AI. Instead, AI uses sensors to investigate the environment, checks the needs of the driven agent, makes decisions and finds goals perhaps considering knowledge and emotions and culture, makes plans to reach the goals, and steers the agent accordingly by executing belonging actions. This is already a sufficiently complex problem by itself. (Not each AI considers all enumerated topics, but I wanted to show margins in which AI works.)
Actions output by AI are still somewhat high level. Sub-systems at lower levels deal with them. E.g. actions belonging to movement of the agent may be processed by the locomotion sub-system. This again may drive the animation or physics or both sub-systems. In your case of dynamic motion, the locomotion sub-system may output some physical force as input to the physical simulation.
EDIT: BTW, I'm seconding Ashaman73 suggestion to switch over to kinematic control.