Businesses are rapidly adopting AI agents for tasks, with projections showing a surge from 23% to 74% in two years. However, robust safety measures lag significantly, with only 21% of companies reporting adequate oversight. This gap poses risks as agents gain independence, potentially leading to errors and security vulnerabilities without proper governance.
To compare, the portion of companies that report not using them at all, currently 25%, is expected to shrink to just 5%. Only around 21% of respondents told Deloitte that their company currently has robust safety and oversight mechanisms in place to prevent possible harms caused by agents. Another study published in September 2025 by the nonprofit National Cybersecurity Alliance revealed that while a growing number of people are using AI tools like ChatGPT on a daily basis, including at work, most of them are doing so without having received any kind of safety training from their employers (teaching them, for example, about the privacy risks that come with using chatbots).
Based on a survey of over 3,200 business leaders across 24 countries, 23% of companies are currently using AI agents “at least moderately”, but this figure is projected to jump to 74% in the next two years, according to a recently published State of AI in the Enterprise report by Deloitte. Businesses are ramping up their use of AI agents faster than they’re putting in place adequate guardrails. However, the rise of agents (AI tools trained to perform multistep tasks with little human supervision) in the workplace isn’t accompanied by adequate guardrails. Companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce have promoted agents as productivity-boosting tools, with the main idea that businesses can hand off repetitive, low-stakes workplace tasks to them while human employees focus on more important work. But early studies like Deloitte’s new State of Generative AI in the Enterprise report point to what could very well become a dangerous gap between deployment and safety as industries scale up their use of agents and other powerful AI tools.