Commissioned by AvePoint
Published June 2026
Executive summary
AvePoint’s third annual report on the state of AI in organizations.
The report finds that AI has scaled into everyday work, and organizations have less visibility into what employees are using than they did a year ago. The percentage of organizations unable to determine whether employees are using unsanctioned AI tools has nearly tripled, from 6.3% in 2025 to 17.6% in 2026. For AI agents specifically, that blind spot is higher still, with 21.1% of organizations unable to account for unsanctioned agent activity.
The findings underscore why organizations are increasingly seeking a trust layer for AI: an operational foundation of visibility, governance, and enforceable control that scales alongside AI adoption.
The study, conducted in partnership with Osterman Research, surveyed 750 enterprise leaders with direct responsibility for information management, data security, or AI programs across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.
Key findings:
- Up to 1 in 5 organizations don’t know whether employees are using unsanctioned AI tools, a visibility gap that has nearly tripled since 2025 for generative AI (6.3% to 17.6%) and is even higher for AI agents at 21.1%
- More than 4 in 5 organizations are confident in their ability to prevent unauthorized AI-related data access, yet up to 72% of confident organizations still experienced an unauthorized access incident in the past 12 months
- Nearly 9 in 10 organizations delayed both agentic and generative AI deployments by an average of almost six months, citing data security and governance concerns as the primary cause
- 35.5% of enterprise data is now AI-generated; this figure is expected to reach 42.1% within 12 months, expanding the surface that governance must cover
- 46.9% of employees rely on AI agents daily or weekly, yet 88.4% of organizations experienced at least one agent-related security incident in the past year, driving investment toward third-party governance tools and emerging AI Agent Management Platforms (AMPs) as the top planned investment for the next 12 months