Alcon, the eye-care firm working in additional than 60 nations, constructed over 900 AI brokers in beneath a yr. “Everybody went and constructed their very own brokers — enterprise customers and IT customers alike,” stated Sreenivasa Patibandla, the corporate’s Director of System Integrations and APIs.
It’s a helpful opening to Salesforce’s 2026 Connectivity Benchmark Report, as a result of it illustrates how agent deployment has moved sooner than the frameworks designed to manipulate it.
The report, the eleventh annual version produced with Vanson Bourne and Deloitte Digital, finds that 89% of organisations are already deploying AI brokers throughout most or all of their groups. Organisations at present run a mean of 12 brokers, with that quantity projected to develop 67% inside two years. Half of these brokers function in isolation, disconnected from each other and in lots of instances from any central oversight. Solely 54% of organisations have a proper governance framework overlaying their agent deployments.
The report describes a state of affairs that’s most likely acquainted for IT leaders: procurement and deployment have occurred sooner than coverage. The distinction now could be scale, and the speed at which it’s nonetheless accelerating.
What uncoordinated brokers really value
The sensible penalties of ungoverned agent sprawl are usually not theoretical. The report identifies a number of that IT groups are already coping with. Redundant automations are being inbuilt parallel throughout departments as a result of no registry exists to indicate what’s already deployed. Information governance gaps are widening: an estimated 27% of enterprise APIs are at present ungoverned, and solely 49% of organisations have addressed cross-application information governance as a part of their integration technique. Eighty-six p.c of IT leaders within the survey stated they’re involved that brokers will introduce extra complexity than worth with out stronger integration frameworks.
There’s additionally a compliance dimension. Brokers making selections or accessing information with no documented governance path create audit publicity, notably for organisations topic to information safety regulation. The 46% of organisations with no centralised oversight framework are, in impact, working automated processes at scale with restricted capability to account for what these processes do.
Andrew Comstock, SVP and GM of MuleSoft at Salesforce, put it by way of what the IT perform is now being requested to personal.
“The true success of an agentic enterprise isn’t discovered within the sheer variety of brokers deployed, however the total effectiveness of these brokers. We’d like to consider how they’re found, ruled and orchestrated to work collectively. The function of IT is evolving from managing silos to constructing a unified basis because the central management airplane that enables multi-agent techniques to be protected, dependable, and scalable.”
The structure drawback beneath governance
The governance hole doesn’t exist in isolation. The variety of functions working throughout enterprise environments grew from 897 to 957 year-on-year, with solely 27% of them built-in. Ninety-six p.c of organisations say they face limitations to utilizing information successfully for agent use instances. Forty p.c level to outdated IT structure and information silos as the first blocker.
This issues for patrons evaluating agent platforms, as a result of the query of whether or not an agent may be ruled relies upon partly on whether or not it may be seen. Brokers that function on information held in disconnected techniques, with no shared context layer, are tougher to observe, tougher to audit, and tougher to roll again when one thing goes flawed. The report finds that 94% of IT leaders agree that agent success requires IT structure to develop into extra API-driven, with APIs performing as the mixing layer that makes brokers discoverable and their exercise traceable.
Salesforce’s personal reply to that is Agent Cloth, which the corporate has considerably expanded. It’s a centralised registry and management layer that mechanically discovers brokers throughout third-party platforms together with Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Vertex AI, and brings them right into a single governance view. The report’s conclusions and Salesforce’s product roadmap are pointing on the similar drawback, which patrons ought to issue into how they learn the suggestions.
Deloitte’s learn on what organisations must do
Deloitte Digital’s involvement within the analysis provides a perspective from the implementation aspect. Kurt Anderson, managing director and API transformation chief at Deloitte Consulting, was direct about the place the precedence ought to sit.
“That is an inflection level. Enterprises should transfer from merely deploying brokers to operationalising them at scale by means of sustainable and safe integration methods. By establishing API-driven guardrails, enterprises can guarantee their agentic transformation is prepared for the calls for of the trendy enterprise.”
That framing aligns with what patrons have been listening to throughout the business. At Enterprise Join in March, governance and observability had moved clearly to the centre of vendor conversations, with pre-deployment testing and audit tooling handled as necessities fairly than non-obligatory extras. The 2026 Connectivity Benchmark provides analysis weight to what has develop into a constant message from distributors and analysts: production-grade agent deployment requires governance infrastructure to be in place earlier than scale, not after it.
Three questions IT leaders must be asking now
The report’s most helpful output for patrons is much less about what distributors ought to construct and extra about what IT groups must be checking internally. Based mostly on the findings, three questions are value placing to your personal organisation.
First: do you’ve gotten a whole stock of brokers at present deployed, together with these constructed or procured by particular person groups with out central IT involvement? The Alcon case suggests most organisations don’t. With out that stock, governance frameworks are engaged on incomplete info.
Second: are the techniques your brokers entry built-in nicely sufficient to provide constant, auditable outputs? Sixty-eight p.c of IT leaders within the survey stated they nonetheless discover it tough to maintain present with rising agent requirements, together with Agent-to-Agent (A2A) and Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP), each of that are related to how brokers share context and hand off between techniques. In case your structure doesn’t help these protocols, agent coordination would require handbook intervention on the factors the place it must be automated.
Third: what occurs when an agent comes to a decision that seems to be flawed? The governance framework query is not only about compliance. It’s about whether or not your organisation can determine what occurred, who or what was accountable, and methods to stop recurrence. With agent counts set to develop by two thirds over the following two years, the reply to that query must be in place earlier than the following wave of deployments, not constructed to meet up with them.
