Enterprises are adopting AI faster than they can connect, govern and trust it at scale, leaving 77% to have experienced a negative consequence from an ungoverned AI agent, according to Redwood Logistics’ “Enterprise benchmarks in AI and agentic orchestration 2026” report.
“The demo is the easy part. The real test begins when an AI agent touches a production system, a financial transaction or a customer interaction,” says Charles Crouchman, chief product officer at Redwood. “At that point, governance can’t live in a policy document or wait for a post-incident review. An orchestration platform has to enforce it inside the process, setting boundaries for the agent and bringing in human judgment before an exception becomes a business problem.”
Key takeaways:
· Unexpected cloud costs ranks as the most common challenge experienced by ungoverned AI agents, followed by operational disruption and compliance issues.
- 89% increased agentic deployment in the past year, and 54% report scaling or mature agentic adoption
- 82% agree that existing systems are bigger obstacles to scaling AI than a lack of strategy, and only 42% report a strong ability to connect AI agents to legacy or core systems
- Responsibility is split among IT operations, dedicated AI or automation teams and software engineering.
- 54% say they are fully prepared to orchestrate AI across existing systems, but only 42% have a centralized registry of deployed agents, and just 51% have real-time monitoring of agent activity
- 62% pointed to better observability or real-time visibility, while 58% cited a proven ability to integrate AI agents with legacy or core systems.
