Managing agentic AI’s speed, scale and sprawl: Insights from Think 2026

Over the past year, advances in agentic AI have yielded incredible increases in speed and sophistication. For companies pursuing agentic transformation, the challenge is no longer getting to real-world results—it’s controlling what happens next.

Agentic AI adoption is exploding. IBM survey data shows that by the end of this year, most large-scale enterprise will have deployed a digital workforce of over 1,600 AI agents. With that scale comes structural strain: seven in ten executives surveyed say that the inability of their existing AI governance is slowing down their AI transformation.

The faster new services and features go from ideation to real-world deployment, the harder it is to maintain oversight and organizational alignment. Agentic coding is a powerful tool, but tools are not systems—and systems are what drives enterprise evolution. A tool provides velocity and momentum; a system ensures that tools and teams move together in the right direction and stay on course.At Think 2026, IT and business leaders from Disney, BNP Paribas, New York Life, Warby Parker, EY and many more joined IBM leaders to explore ways to build an agentic enterprise at speed and scale without sacrificing control or cohesion. “The question comes down to: how deeply is AI embedded in your business processes?” said Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO, inhis opening keynote. “Is it a part of the enterprise? Or is it something on the side?”