Alcon, the eye-care company operating in more than 60 countries, built over 900 AI agents in under a year. "Everyone went and built their own agents — business users and IT users alike," said Sreenivasa Patibandla, the company's Director of System Integrations and APIs.
It's a useful opening to Salesforce's 2026 Connectivity Benchmark Report, because it illustrates how agent deployment has moved faster than the frameworks designed to govern it.
The report, the 11th annual edition produced with Vanson Bourne and Deloitte Digital, finds that 89% of organisations are already deploying AI agents across most or all of their teams. Organisations currently run an average of 12 agents, with that number projected to grow 67% within two years. Half of those agents operate in isolation, disconnected from one another and in many cases from any central oversight. Only 54% of organisations have a formal governance framework covering their agent deployments.
The report describes a situation that is probably familiar for IT leaders: procurement and deployment have happened faster than policy. The difference now is scale, and the rate at which it is still accelerating.
What uncoordinated agents actually cost
The practical consequences of ungoverned agent sprawl are not theoretical. The report identifies several that IT teams are already dealing with. Redundant automations are being built in parallel across departments because no registry exists to show what is already deployed. Data governance gaps are widening: an estimated 27% of enterprise APIs are currently ungoverned, and only 49% of organisations have addressed cross-application data governance as part of their integration strategy. Eighty-six percent of IT leaders in the survey said they are concerned that agents will introduce more complexity than value without stronger integration frameworks.
There is also a compliance dimension. Agents making decisions or accessing data without a documented governance trail create audit exposure, particularly for organisations subject to data protection regulation. The 46% of organisations without a centralised oversight framework are, in effect, running automated processes at scale with limited ability to account for what those processes do.
Andrew Comstock, SVP and GM of MuleSoft at Salesforce, put it in terms of what the IT function is now being asked to own.
"The true success of an agentic enterprise isn't found in the sheer number of agents deployed, but the overall effectiveness of those agents. We need to think about how they are discovered, governed and orchestrated to work together. The role of IT is evolving from managing silos to building a unified foundation as the central control plane that allows multi-agent systems to be safe, reliable, and scalable."
The architecture problem underneath governance
The governance gap doesn't exist in isolation. The number of applications running across enterprise environments grew from 897 to 957 year-on-year, with only 27% of them integrated. Ninety-six percent of organisations say they face barriers to using data effectively for agent use cases. Forty percent point to outdated IT architecture and data silos as the primary blocker.
This matters for buyers evaluating agent platforms, because the question of whether an agent can be governed depends partly on whether it can be seen. Agents that operate on data held in disconnected systems, with no shared context layer, are harder to monitor, harder to audit, and harder to roll back when something goes wrong. The report finds that 94% of IT leaders agree that agent success requires IT architecture to become more API-driven, with APIs acting as the integration layer that makes agents discoverable and their activity traceable.
