Credit: Dataiku Most chief information officers cannot fully see the AI agents their staff build outside approved systems, a survey by Dataiku found. 81% of the 685 CIOs polled said they lack complete oversight of AI agents created outside formal channels. The Harris Poll ran the survey online for Dataiku from 9 to 29 July. It covered CIOs in the US, the UK, France, Germany, the UAE, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. Dataiku, a Paris-founded company now based in New York, released the Global AI Confessions Report: CIO Edition on Thursday at Succeed, its annual conference.
Tracking agents, but not their results 90% of CIOs said they have complete tracking of all their agents. Yet 72% said they cannot consistently confirm whether those agents deliver the business outcomes they were built for. 67% estimate that 51 or more agents are running in production. 83% lack standardised lifecycle management for agents across the organisation. 47% have already decommissioned more than 20 agents this year. Only 21% have full, near-real-time visibility into AI costs by team or use case. 84% agree that employees are creating agents and applications faster than IT can govern them. 60% lack a central AI governance layer across their apps, tools and IT environments. CIOs also split on who owns an agent that goes wrong.
Their answers were shared teams (23%), central IT (21%), the data or AI team (20%) and security, risk and compliance (18%). “Monitoring tells you an agent is running. Managing tells you whether it’s earned the right to keep running, and right now, almost nobody can fire an agent,” said Florian Douetteau, co-founder and CEO of Dataiku. Jobs and budgets on the line 88% of CIOs said success with AI will shape their reputation or career. 87% said their CEO has told them their job security depends on AI outcomes. 76% expect their role to be at risk if their company shows no measurable gains from AI by the end of 2027. 72% expect a cut or freeze to their AI budget if they miss performance targets by the end of 2026. 97% report at least some rise in board pressure to show a return on AI. Dataiku said US CIOs posted some of the starkest numbers. 94% of them say employees build agents faster than IT can govern them. 87% expect budget cuts or a freeze if targets slip. 82% regret at least one major AI vendor or platform choice from the past 18 months.
On models, 75% plan to use more or different ones. 74% are considering open-source or open-weight models as a hedge in case a model becomes unavailable. Dataiku’s own product Dataiku sells software for this problem. On the same day it launched Agent Management, which pulls agents into one inventory. It connects to AWS Bedrock, Databricks, Google Vertex, Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure Foundry, Salesforce Agentforce and Snowflake Cortex.
It goes on general sale in October, priced per instance each year, with monitoring charged per agent. Separately, Gartner predicted in June 2025 that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027. It cited rising costs, unclear business value and inadequate risk controls. At Amazon, AWS says almost 90% of early agent prototypes never reached production.
