This summer, our big concern as IT leaders was figuring out how to drive adoption and ROI for our AI purchases while keeping shadow AI at bay. My advice then: Give people transparent, sanctioned tools and put in place operational discipline to ensure the right tools are being deployed at the right times and in the righ…
This summer, our big concern as IT leaders was figuring out how to drive adoption and ROI for our AI purchases while keeping shadow AI at bay. My advice then: Give people transparent, sanctioned tools and put in place operational discipline to ensure the right tools are being deployed at the right times and in the righ…
But once again, the market shifted. Now, even the sanctioned tools are part of the problem, as we speed towards the autonomous, agentic enterprise.
Fortune reported recently that CIOs are “racing to put guardrails” around agents that one security chief called “a new kind of insider.” Gartner forecasts that 40% of enterprise applications will carry task-specific agents by the end of this year, up from under 5% last year. In the very same report, Gartner also predicts that 40% of enterprises will have to demote or shut down agents by 2027.
We’re building agents faster than we’re learning how to govern them.
Most leaders point to this as a visibility problem. We need to be able to see all the agents running and assign ownership to them. Fair points, but they only reveal the tip of the iceberg. The agents I’m concerned with are the ones nobody knows they’re creating.
Classic shadow AI is a tool someone chose: an employee connects a hyped consumer product straight into a corporate system, and now you have an unsanctioned agent running on unsanctioned software. That’s the fix I have written about before: give people a sanctioned version good enough that they don’t need the workaround.
In context
- Topic: Estrategia y Gobierno de TI — Decisiones de portafolio, costo total, gobierno y marcos de referencia.
- Source: CIO
- Published: 19/10/2026
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Why it matters
When an organisation announces a turn like this, the announcement is rarely the interesting part. What matters is everything it forces to be reordered underneath: committed budgets, live contracts, teams built for something else. That is where you find out whether the decision had real backing or was a slide in a deck.
My filter is always the same: does this change a decision, or only a tool? If at the end of the quarter the same people are approving the same things by the same criteria, there was no transformation, there was a purchase. The difference shows up in the committee minutes, not in the press release.
What usually goes wrong
Where I see this fail most is in the second half of the year. The announcement is made with energy, the team gets assembled, and eight months later the person driving it changed role or company. Without an institutional owner, not just a personal one, the programme fades without anybody formally cancelling it.
What to watch
- What gets switched off to fund the new thing; if nothing does, the budget will hurt in six months.
- How the relationship with current vendors is left, which is usually where the dependency nobody measured is sitting.
- Who ends up owning the decision, and with what budget of their own rather than borrowed.
How I read this entry
The way I would bring this down to earth is in three moves: name an owner with their own budget, define two metrics reviewed in committee every month, and set a date on which somebody decides to continue or stop. It is unglamorous, and it is what separates programmes that land from programmes that get discussed.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
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Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
