A recent study from Omdia confirmed what many in the field already knew: governance and compliance are still the biggest barriers to AI adoption. In fact, they rank above more technical challenges like data and security management, value realization and technical expertise gaps.
Governance and compliance have been persistent challenges throughout the AI era. The emergence of agentic AI is further complicating these issues, delaying rollouts and presenting significant security risks.
Agentic AI poses unique compliance and governance risks
Because they have the power to act autonomously without direct human prompting, AI agents pose unique risks and compliance threats.
Organizations must impose strict rules to govern the behavior of their AI agents. They also have to make sure that agents cannot access or share confidential information. Additionally, they must comply with regulations, like emerging U.S. state and federal laws, the EU AI Act, and forthcoming legislation in the United Kingdom.
Still, despite the unique risks of agentic AI and the growing burdens of compliance, agents are largely ungoverned. One report found, for example, that more than half of all agents in an average organization are ungoverned. Another report estimated that there are roughly 3 million ungoverned agents in the U.K. and U.S. alone.
The data clearly shows that many leaders don’t have a firm understanding of how many agents they have, or what those agents are doing. This poses obvious compliance risks and data protection threats. Without visibility, governance and control, agents can easily become risky cost centers, rather than productivity multipliers. This threatens AI investments and operational security.
According to Gartner, 40% of agentic AI projects will be abandoned by the end of 2027, largely due to data quality and security concerns. In addition, AvePoint research found that 86% of AI deployments are delayed by up to a year, also driven by data quality and security issues.
A solution to agentic AI adoption woes: integration
To strengthen data protection and management while tackling governance and compliance challenges, more organizations are turning to integrated platforms and solutions. The recent Omdia report showed that 91% of MSPs want integrated backup and recovery, while 49% want a fully integrated platform.
As AI usage grows and agentic AI exacerbates existing adoption challenges, integrated solutions offer a viable path forward. Integrated platforms eliminate complexity and are more effective than disconnected alternatives. By leveraging unified systems that combine governance, compliance and data protection features, organizations can monitor agent activity, automate regulatory reporting and enforce access controls in real time.
Sam Valme
Disconnected point solutions theoretically offer a similar level of coverage. However, a platform saves time and money by:
- Centralizing oversight
- Reducing the risk of unauthorized data exposure
- Streamlining compliance with evolving regulations
With agentic AI raising the stakes and complexity of AI governance, point solutions look increasingly unattractive. That’s why platforms are increasingly popular and in demand among partners and their customers.
Practical steps to success for service providers
MSPs can address these governance challenges and provide immediate value by helping customers impose discipline before they scale. That starts with practical discovery work:
- Audit where agents are already in use.
- Identify what data they can reach.
- Map which business processes they influence.
From there, partners can help customers establish usage policies that define who can build agents, what approvals are required and which actions must be reviewed by humans.
MSPs can also lead data access clean-up projects. This will tighten permissions and reduce the volume of stale, duplicated or overexposed information that agents might surface.
Service providers can also educate and train business and IT teams on responsible deployment. This way, organizations treat agentic AI as an operational capability that requires oversight, rather than an experiment.
The road ahead
We live in an exciting time. AI has now advanced to a point where it can handle tasks autonomously and with a high degree of competence. It has the potential to transform entire industries in positive ways.
But research shows us that the revolutionary potential of this technology may be squandered if businesses fail to implement the right kinds of support. MSPs play a critical role in leading this new wave of digital transformation.
Sam Valme is channel evangelism director for AvePoint.
Featured image: rafsya — stock.adobe.com
