Rubrik Zero Labs has released new research showing that the rapid adoption of agentic AI is outpacing organizations’ ability to secure these autonomous systems. The report highlights a growing gap between innovation speed and the necessary security, governance, and resilience controls.
Organizations are operationalizing autonomous AI systems without adequate controls to observe, govern, or restore them. This creates significant risks as non-human identities proliferate faster than they can be tracked, forming what the report describes as a “shadow workforce.”
These identities often operate with limited oversight, increasing pathways for misuse, compromise, and lateral movement. At the same time, many organizations report that agents demand more manual intervention than the efficiency gains they deliver.
“AI adoption is outpacing our ability to control it. Enterprises are struggling because they’ve deployed systems they can’t fully observe, govern, or restore,” said Kavitha Mariappan, Chief Transformation Officer at Rubrik. “We have to move past the debate of whether AI is risky and address the harder reality: as decision-making shifts from human to machine, the critical challenge for every leader is maintaining operational safety in an increasingly autonomous landscape.”
The research also points to recovery and prevention as emerging points of failure. Nearly nine in ten leaders are concerned about their ability to meet recovery objectives amid rising agent-driven threats. Nearly half expect agentic systems to drive the majority of attacks in the coming year.
“Identity verification is the fundamental underpinning that will allow us to get the greatest automation benefits of AI without imposing human bottlenecks,” said Steven Ramirez, VP, Chief Information Security & Technology Officer at Renown Health. “Verification and visibility are prerequisites for sound, secure agentic implementation.”
About Rubrik
Rubrik (RBRK), the Security and AI Operations Company, leads at the intersection of data protection, cyber resilience, and enterprise AI acceleration. Rubrik Security Cloud delivers complete cyber resilience by securing, monitoring, and recovering data, identities, and workloads across clouds. Rubrik Agent Cloud accelerates trusted AI agent deployments at scale by monitoring and auditing agentic actions, enforcing real-time guardrails, fine-tuning for accuracy and undoing agentic mistakes.
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