AI agents are working in your organization right now, booking meetings, creating tickets, updating CRMs, and executing workflows on behalf of your employees. And according to new research from Cisco and Omdia, the race to deploy them is moving faster than most organizations' ability to secure them.

That gap is the defining challenge of enterprise AI in 2026, and it's top of mind for every CISO, CIO, and operations leader.

The Scale of the Shift

Cisco's Race to Agentic AI report, based on a survey of 650 enterprise executives across six countries, paints a striking picture of just how fast this transformation is happening. On average, executives estimate that 55% of their workforce will regularly collaborate with AI agents within the next 24 months, and 87% say agentic AI has already directly reshaped their strategic priorities.

Organizations are moving from experimentation to production, and the pressure to scale is intensifying. In fact, 80% of executives surveyed believe agentic AI will be essential for competitive survival by 2027.

But scaling a new technology invites security risks.

Adoption Is Outpacing Security

The same report revealed a troubling disconnect: 62% of executives say they struggle to protect networks from AI-driven attacks, manage agent identities, and secure data in motion. That means the majority of organizations racing to deploy AI agents are doing so without the infrastructure to govern them safely.

The Cisco report calls out governance as a central concern, noting that 91% of organizations are moving toward centralized AI governance models precisely because decentralized, ad hoc approaches create inconsistent behavior and make security protocols and audit capabilities nearly impossible to enforce consistently.

The conclusion is clear: you can't scale agentic AI on ungoverned infrastructure.

What the Research Says You Actually Need

The Cisco research points to three imperatives for organizations serious about scaling agents safely: consistency, security, and standardization. In practice, that means controlling agent access and having the necessary observability and audit trails for usage.

The organizations already running agents in production, are significantly more likely to have established centralized AI governance structures. And the payoff is real: they report better outcomes across operational efficiency, decision-making, and revenue impact compared to organizations still in the planning phase.

Organizations that treat governance infrastructure with the same urgency as AI deployment are pulling ahead.

How Agen.co for Work Closes the Gap

This is the exact problem Agen.co for Work was built to solve. Rather than forcing a choice between enabling your workforce or protecting your organization, it gives security and IT teams centralized control and visibility while giving employees a fast, frictionless path to connect the AI tools they need.

• Employees authenticate through your existing identity provider, so there are no new systems to manage and no ungoverned tokens floating around.

• Security admins get a real-time view of every agent interaction across the organization.

• When someone requests access to a tool that hasn't been approved yet, that request routes through a structured workflow rather than getting bypassed entirely.

• And every action is logged with a full audit trail for compliance.

It works across any MCP-compatible platform, including Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor, so your employees keep using the tools they already have while your security team gets the governance layer they've been missing.

The Window Is Narrow

The Cisco research report is clear about the cost of delay: in a market where 80% of executives believe agentic AI will be essential for survival by 2027, waiting isn't a neutral choice. The organizations investing in governance infrastructure now are the ones that will scale with confidence. The ones that don't are building on a foundation that will eventually force a reckoning.

If your employees are already using AI agents, and they almost certainly are, the question isn't whether to govern that activity. It's whether you'll do it proactively or reactively.

Start for free or contact the Agen.co team to see how Agen.co for Work fits into your organization's AI strategy.