Collibra, the enterprise AI control plane, today announced the findings of a Harris Poll survey of more than 300 U.S. adults employed full time as data management, privacy, and AI decision-makers. Announced in New York and Brussels, survey entitled The 2026 Hallucination Tax Report found while nine in ten organizations are actively deploying autonomous AI agents, more than three-quarters have hit critical roadblocks attempting to move from pilot into full production.
The research found that 72% of decision-makers agree that when their organization's AI initiatives fall short, the root cause almost always traces back to an unaligned or poor data foundation. These findings also reflect broader industry trends where Gartner reports that at least 50% of enterprise generative AI projects are abandoned after proof of concept due to poor data quality, escalating costs, and inadequate risk controls.
"The AI conversation across the C-suite has fundamentally shifted from the theoretical to measurable business impact," said Felix Van de Maele, Co-founder and CEO of Collibra. "We have found that every enterprise scaling AI today is paying a hallucination tax — a hidden cost of manual oversight, rework, and risk that grows with every new agent put in production. If human workers have to spend countless hours manually validating every response, the business value of automation ultimately disappears, and companies carry the burden."
The report highlights that absence of structured context and runtime governance is forcing organizations back into costly manual supervision, and 87% of decision-makers say their teams regularly re-verify that the context their agents have remained accurate and current creating an unsustainable bottleneck that caps deployment. Additionally, just over half of respondents at 51% report spending significant staff hours manually reviewing and correcting autonomous AI agent outputs before they go live. This operational friction is felt even more acutely among large enterprises: decision-makers at organizations with $100 million or more in revenue are significantly more likely to report manual review drains at 64% and state that root cause almost always traces back to poor data foundations at 96%.
In response to these operational hurdles, enterprises are fundamentally restructuring their organizational lines to bring machine intelligence and data governance together. More than half of decision-makers at 53% report that the reporting line for their AI function has moved closer to the primary data organization over the past 12 months, rising to 62% among organizations with $100 million or more in revenue. At the same time, an overwhelming 84% of organizations say they have clearly defined executive accountability when autonomous agents produce flawed or harmful outputs.
As global oversight accelerates, enterprise leaders are also taking proactive measures to prepare for shifting regulatory standards. Nine in ten leaders at 90% report that their organizations are actively preparing for evolving AI regulations across federal, state, and international jurisdictions. To ensure long-term compliance and operational transparency, organizations are primarily focusing on establishing clear internal accountability for AI outputs and decisions at 58% and making targeted investments in data lineage and documentation at 51%.
"To move from pilots to enterprise-wide production, businesses cannot simply deploy smarter models; they must build the right context and control directly into their workflows," added Van de Maele. "We have focused our latest innovations on solving this exact bottleneck. By providing organizations with the architecture to govern context and enforce automated guardrails at runtime, leaders can finally eliminate the operational friction holding AI back and scale autonomous workflows with certainty."
About Collibra
Collibra is the enterprise AI control plane. Built over eighteen years of ontology engineering, it governs context and control across any data, any model and any agent for AI leaders who need certainty at the speed of AI. A 5x Forrester Wave Leader and 2x Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader, Collibra serves more than 700 customers, including 78 of the Fortune 500 and governs more than 2 billion assets.
