Most EMEA Firms Deploy AI Agents Without Governance
SailPoint's survey finds 89% of EMEA enterprises run AI agents while 99% lack purpose-built tools to govern them.
Updated on Nov. 4, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence
Live Poll
Do you trust companies to keep their AI tools under proper control?
SailPoint released findings from its Horizons of Identity Security Report at its annual Navigate conference, showing that 89% of EMEA enterprises have deployed AI agents while 99% lack purpose-built tools to govern them. The findings describe survey results and newly introduced platform capabilities for governing AI agents; the governance tools are announced, not independently verified.
Why it matters
Organisations have built capable AI agents in production faster than governance has developed around them. Regulatory pressure from DORA and the EU AI Act is pushing enterprises toward greater resilience, making identity governance for AI agents a near-term operational concern.
The report is a survey-based study, and its headline figures describe the share of respondents rather than measured system performance. SailPoint's new platform introduces classes of agents designed to detect real-time threats and orchestrate other agent classes, but no benchmark or performance measurement for those agents is reported.
The players
SailPoint
An identity security company whose platform governs access for human and non-human accounts, now extending into governance of AI agents.
The details
AI agents are software systems that take actions autonomously on a user's behalf, such as accessing data or calling other applications. Identity security governs which accounts, including non-human accounts used by software, can access which resources. SailPoint's new capabilities introduce agents that monitor for threats in real time and coordinate other agents, extending identity governance to the agents themselves. Shadow AI refers to AI tools deployed inside an organisation without formal oversight or approval.
Timeline
SailPoint released the Horizons findings at its Navigate conference on November 4, 2026.
The Tech Race
The survey places enterprise AI agent deployment ahead of governance maturity, leaving most EMEA organisations at the earliest identity security stage. SailPoint's agent-governance capabilities position it as a vendor addressing that gap, though the extraction does not name competing governance products.
Enterprises deploying AI agents will need identity governance that covers those agents, and SailPoint's new platform capabilities are presented as one route to that coverage. The extraction gives no pricing, availability date, or rollout timeline for these capabilities, so their practical arrival for any given organisation is unconfirmed.
The takeaway
Watch for independent reporting on whether organisations adopting SailPoint's agent-governance capabilities close the reported gap between AI agent deployment and identity controls. Any follow-up release of the Horizons report methodology would show how the 89% and 99% figures were measured.
Further reading
For broader context on how businesses are putting AI systems to work, explore our Artificial Intelligence coverage.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Manufacturing & Logistics IT Magazine.
Live Poll
Do you trust companies to keep their AI tools under proper control?
