With the average Global Fortune 500 enterprise expected to run more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, up from fewer than 15 today, there’s plenty of room for chaos. Analyst firm Gartner says that, without proper governance, those agents will multiply and run amok.

Governance is key to deriving value from AI deployments, according to Gartner researchers who delved into the problem for the company’s Digital Workplace Summit in London this week.

"As CIOs and IT leaders see an explosion of AI agents across their organizations, many are contending with an ungoverned sprawl of agents," Max Goss, senior director analyst at Gartner, said at the summit.

Half of the organizations Gartner surveyed said that they limited internal AI rollouts to low-risk or trusted users, but, in doing so, those same organizations were less likely to report high returns from their generative AI tools compared with companies that expanded access more broadly under strong governance, with broader adopters being 3.3 times more likely to…