Workato, the leading Control and Execution Platform for Enterprise AI, today released new industry research showing that IT leaders expect to be held accountable for AI agents they don't fully control. Nearly two-thirds would bet that an AI agent will cause a public security or compliance incident at their own company within the next 18 months, highlighting critical governance challenges as agentic AI spreads across enterprises.
The report, AI Challenges Threatening IT Leader Success, is based on a survey of 1,001 U.S. IT decision-makers at VP-level and above, including CIOs and other C-suite executives, at organizations with more than 1,000 employees. It details the five biggest challenges IT leaders shared about governing agentic AI as it spreads across the business.
"IT leaders are in a double bind. They are pushed to roll out increasingly powerful AI, yet they can't fully control it, and they are on the hook when it goes wrong," said Adam Seligman, CTO of Workato. "They want a better way to control AI and govern its execution end to end. These findings reinforce the demand for enterprise-wide governance and control of AI that allows companies to innovate while giving IT leadership the control and visibility required."
The research found that IT leaders expect to shoulder significant responsibility for AI failures, despite gaps in visibility and oversight. 74% said IT leadership would be held accountable if an AI agent took an action that violated policy, exposed data, or harmed a customer, more than twice as many as those who said accountability would lie with the AI vendor. 23% said they would personally be expected to resign or be removed if an AI agent caused a major public security or compliance incident. 60% worry more about AI agents than traditional cyberattacks. 63% said their IT team knows less about how AI agents work than other employees.
Yet leaders aren't pulling back from AI. More than 95% believe the benefits of agentic AI and digital coworkers are overwhelmingly positive, while 92% expect their organizations to adopt digital coworkers over the next 18 months.
As AI adoption scales, IT leaders are looking for greater visibility, auditability, and accountability. When asked what priorities they most wanted to regain regarding agentic AI adoption, visibility into what AI agents are actually doing across systems ranked first at 42% rising to 48% among CTOs, followed by ability to audit and reverse an agent action at 31%, knowing exactly who is accountable at 29%, and confidence that every action is compliant by default at 27%.
That need is becoming more urgent as AI adoption occurs through multiple channels. While 66% of AI agent adoption is coming through IT's formal procurement process, the other 33% is deployed directly, without oversight, by business units and individual employees. At the same time, 64% of IT leaders expect unauthorized deployments to accelerate.
The research also revealed uncertainty around how organizations would respond if an AI agent caused a major security or compliance incident. Nearly half at 46% said the board would demand an external audit, while 36% said the organization would attempt to handle it quietly without disclosure. Nearly a quarter at 24% said their organization would publicly blame the AI vendor.
Many organizations are already taking steps to strengthen governance. Nearly half of IT leaders are currently working to change their integration and orchestration strategy to prepare for autonomous AI agents, and 45% have added AI agents to board-level discussions.
"None of these leaders are asking to slow down," added Seligman. "They want to know what every agent is doing, who owns it, and how to undo it when something goes wrong. Build that control in from the foundation, and the business can move as fast as it wants on AI."
About Workato
Workato is the leading Control and Execution Platform for Enterprise AI — the neutral platform enterprises trust to put AI to work across their business. Workato unifies data, applications, and processes into a single platform so AI can reliably orchestrate business processes in production at enterprise scale. Built on more than a decade of running mission-critical processes for over half the Fortune 500 — including Nasdaq, Cisco, Vodafone, Atlassian, and Lucid Motors — Workato turns over 17,000 enterprise systems AI needs to act on into one governed execution layer.
