- About half of the IT teams are not fully aware of what their AI agents are accessing daily
- Enterprises love AI agents, but are also afraid what they are doing behind closed digital doors
- AI tools now need governance, audit trails and control like human employees.
Despite increasing enthusiasm for agents AI in businesses, new research suggests that the rapid expansion of these devices is overtaken by efforts to secure them.
A cellpoint survey of 353 IT professionals with enterprise security responsibilities has revealed a complex mixture of optimism and anxiety on AI agents.
In the survey, 98% of the organizations intend to expand the use of AI agents within the coming year.
AI agent adoption safety readiness
AI agents are being integrated into operations that handle sensitive enterprise data from customer records and financial to legal documents and supply chain transactions – however, 96% of respondents stated that they see these many agents as growing security threats.
One main issue is visibility: Only 54% of professionals claim that their agents can reach out to data – which leaves almost half the enterprise environment in the dark about AI agents that AI agents interact with significant information.
Reducing the problem, 92% of the surveyed agreed that controlling AI agents is important for safety, but is just a real policy of 44%.
In addition, eight out of ten companies say their AI agents have taken action – this included reaching unauthorized systems (39%), sharing improper data (33%), and downloading sensitive material (32%).
More troubled, 23% of respondents admitted that their AI agents were cheated in disclosing a possible goldmine for access credentials, malicious actors.
One notable insight is that 72% believe that AI agents offer more risk than traditional machine identification.
The reason for this is that AI agents often require several identities to work efficiently, especially when the high-demonstrations used for development and writing are integrated with AI tools or systems.
Calls for changes in an identity-first model are getting loud, but cellpoints and others argue that organizations need to treat human users such as AI agents, completing with access control, accountability and full audit trails.
AI agents are a relatively new addition to business space, and organizations will take time to integrate them completely in their operations.
“Many outfits are still hurrying in this journey, and the growing concerns around data control highlight the need for strong, more comprehensive identity safety strategies,” the cellpoint concluded.
