Why enterprise investment in AI agents hasn’t yielded results

The challenge? Traditional security approaches don’t work for AI agents, which require comprehensive guardrails spanning authentication, authorization, data handling, and decision boundaries. With 42% of respondents requiring eight or more connections to data sources to meet their AI agent initiatives, point-to-point security creates vulnerability gaps with each new integration.

More importantly, AI agents need different types of monitoring and guardrails—it’s not enough to track access. Decisions, data flows, and execution patterns need to be watched closely. Guardrails must be both flexible enough to allow productive work and rigid enough to prevent misuse or unintended consequences. With the risk of enterprise breaches looming, getting this right becomes critical.

Learning from success

Some organizations are finding a better way forward. Take the Aprende Institute, one of our customers, for example. What they estimated as a multi-quarter project went live in days by building on the right foundation. Their success came from focusing on infrastructure first.