150,000 Agents by 2028: What Gartner’s Forecast Means for IT
AI adoption, including agent deployment, is accelerating rapidly, often faster than many organizations and their IT teams can govern it. Gartner predicts that an average Global Fortune 500 enterprise will be using 150,000 AI agents by 2028.
What’s more important is that the same report says that only 13% of organizations think they have the right AI agent governance in place. This number should reshape how business leaders think about scaling AI adoption, budgeting, and governance.
Key Takeaways:
The Growing Importance of AI Agents
The increasing adoption of AI agents is not just a trend that will become obsolete in a few years. It represents a fundamental shift in how businesses are leveraging AI to maximize efficiency and productivity.
As AI technology matures, businesses will deploy agents to streamline more operational and decision-making areas. However, with this growth, comes the challenge of managing a high volume of agents efficiently.
What Does Gartner’s Forecast Mean for Enterprises?
As increasing adoption generates more agent sprawl, IT complexity, and management challenges, Gartner’s forecast underscores the necessity for enterprises to focus on robust AI governance practices, including end-to-end AI agent lifecycle management.
According to the Gartner press release, Max Gross, Sr. Director Analyst at Gartner pointed “Many organizations resort to blocking or restricting the use of AI agents, but this is not a long-term solution. If employees are unable to work in the sanctioned tools, they will likely go around the organization’s controls and start using shadow AI which presents far greater risks. Organizations need to find a balance where they can govern agents and manage sprawl, but also safely empower employees to innovate with these tools.”
The fundamentals are clear. Having proper guardrails is the feasible solution to strategically scale AI agent adoption as opposed to restricting their usage. And that is where AI agent governance tools like CloudFuze Manage come into the picture.
CloudFuze Manage’s AI Agent Governance Solution
CloudFuze Manage aligns with the steps Gartner identified to help IT leaders and CIOs establish governance that reduces agent sprawl risks, including:
| Gartner’s Recommendations | CloudFuze Manage’s AI Agent Governance Solution |
|---|---|
| Establish agent governance and policies | Creating AI agent governance policies (e.g., automatic escalation of agents without owners to IT team for ownership assignment). |
| Build centralized agent inventory | Discovering and categorizing agents deployed across platforms like Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI), Copilot Studio, etc. |
| Define agent identity, permissions and life cycle model | Auditing AI agent permissions and file access to understand what agents can read and write. |
| Develop AI information governance | Reviewing the knowledge files and data sources used to build agents as part of developing AI information governance. |
| Monitor and remediate agent behavior | Monitoring AI safety, flagging PII, credentials, and sensitive data shared with agents, alongside risk scoring for continuous oversight. |
| Foster a culture of responsible AI usage | Supporting IT teams in fostering responsible AI usage through dedicated dashboards that provide actionable insights |
Apart from AI agent lifecycle management and governance, CloudFuze Manage also enables IT teams to get complete visibility into usage of standard AI tools, such as AI assistants, AI coding tools, etc. Here’s the AI Hub that streamlines this process:
Want to See it in Practice?
The best way to understand more about AI governance is to see it in practice. We would love to show you a live demo of how CloudFuze Manage helps you govern every AI agent and tool running in your organization’s cloud environment.
Contact us today for a free and more application demo and/or consultation!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What does Gartner’s forecast of 150,000 AI agents by 2028 mean for IT?
It means the scale of AI adoption can expose organizations to various risks, including agent sprawl. Therefore, it is important to have AI governance policies in place, including having AI agent visibility across various agent platforms, risk scoring agents, establishing specific governance policies, and more.
2. What are the compliance implications of having more AI agents in large organizations?
AI agents that access sensitive data, especially with write permissions, can make unintended changes, exposures, and more, which, in turn, can lead to compliance violations.
3. What governance strategies should IT decision makers consider with the rise of AI agents?
Having visibility over AI agents running across your cloud ecosystem is the first and the most important governance strategy to consider. Other important strategies include setting governance policies, assigning owners to agents, taking actions on stale agents, reviewing knowledge files and data sources used to build agents, and more.
4. What are the security risks associated with using more AI agents?
AI agents can overshare data, hold onto permissions for a long period of time, and connect to risky external systems without anyone noticing. The real danger isn’t one bad agent. It’s thousands of small oversights adding up across the organization.
About the Author: Pankaj Rai
