.jpg)
Camunda, the leader in agentic automation, has released its 2026 State of Agentic Orchestration and Automation report. The findings show that while 71% of organizations now use AI agents, nearly three-quarters (73%) acknowledge a significant gap between their agentic AI vision and current reality. Only 11% of agentic AI use cases reached production in the past year, highlighting persistent barriers including risk, complexity, and skill shortages.
While experimentation with AI agents is widespread, trust issues continue to limit broader deployment. Organizations express high concern over insufficient controls, lack of visibility into AI decision-making, and regulatory compliance risks. As a result, most AI agents remain confined to low-risk, non-critical tasks such as summarization or question-answering, rather than being integrated into mission-critical, end-to-end business processes.
“The promise of agentic AI is undeniable, but trust remains the key barrier to adoption,” said Kurt Petersen, senior vice president, customer success at Camunda. “Right now, exercising caution with agentic AI means many organizations can’t move beyond pilots or isolated use cases. Without clear guardrails and visibility, agents will stay at the edge of the business. Once a foundation of trust is in place, agents can become powerful multipliers inside governed processes instead of siloed copilots or chatbots.”
The report also shows strong progress in process automation overall. 95% of organizations report increased business growth from automation (up from 87% the previous year). On average, companies have automated 48% of their processes and expect to reach 64%. Nearly 80% plan to increase automation budgets, with spending projected to rise by an average of 20% over the next two years.
However, distributed technology stacks and a rapidly growing number of process endpoints create significant challenges. 76% of respondents report an exponential increase in endpoint volume and diversity, while 85% say they need better tools to manage intersections between processes.
The report emphasizes agentic orchestration—blending deterministic process orchestration with dynamic agent reasoning—as the key to unlocking full value from AI investments.
“Agentic orchestration, not standalone agents, is the key to closing the AI vision-reality gap,” added Petersen. “Deterministic orchestration has always established structured guardrails. By blending it with dynamic orchestration patterns to leverage reasoning across AI agents, people, and systems in end-to-end processes, enterprises can build a foundation for AI agents they truly trust. This is enterprise agentic automation in practice, and it is how organizations will turn today’s AI experiments into durable, business-critical capabilities.”
TechIntelPro empowers B2B technology decision-makers with the latest industry trends, deep insights, leadership perspectives and actionable intelligence to drive both organizational and professional milestones—and thrive on the tech pulse.