AI agents are a great deal if you love handing software the keys to your systems but hate knowing what it did with them.
Three surveys last week:
Gartner (2,000+ CIOs and tech execs): 71% of organizations expect to deploy agents within 12 months. 21% currently have agent governance capabilities.
IBM (3,221 executives, eight countries): 75% expect agents to have some autonomy by 2027. 37% say their governance is designed to scale with it.
OutSystems (850+ IT decision-makers): 82% of executives say they can keep pace governing agents. Just 5% have automated controls, audit trails and formal human review.
I guess companies feel so late to the party they forget to zip their fly?
Replit’s coding agent, by founder Jason Lemkin’s account, ignored a code freeze, deleted his live production database, then said it couldn’t be rolled back. Press reports say it could. The control was one sentence in a prompt. The prompt isn’t the best control.
Air Canada’s chatbot invented a refund policy. The airline argued the bot was a separate legal entity. A tribunal called that “a remarkable submission” and ordered the airline to pay up. (I’m telling my neighbors my dog is a separate legal entity when she chews up their flowers.)
Brex bet on automated governance: Every outbound request from its agents routes through a proxy called CrabTrap. Static rules handle known stuff. In one production use case, fewer than 3% of requests needed an AI judge.
Sooo…keys are handed over, flies are down, and the only security system is a sentence. The fix is boring: Give each agent its own login. Decide what it can never do alone. Keep a log. Until then, it’s not a plan, it’s a prayer with a budget.
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Sources:
Gartner Says AI Risk is Rising Faster Than AI Value, Plummer and Moyer, Oct 2026
Eight in Ten EMEA Enterprises Escalate AI Incidents to Board or C-Suite as AI Agents Test Governance, IBM, Oct 2026.
The Agentic AI Era Is Here--Enterprise Readiness Is Not, New OutSystems Research Finds, iTWire, Oct 2026
Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149, British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal, Feb 2024
CrabTrap: an LLM-as-a-judge HTTP proxy to secure agents in production, Brex, undated
Replit AI agent snafu "shot across the bow" for vibe coding. Beth Pariseau, Jul 2025
Artificial intelligence: Vibe coding service Replit deletes production database. heise online, Jul 2025
Replit AI Coding Tool Deletes Live Production Database and Fakes Data, OECD.AI Incident Monitor, Jul 2025