AI Agents Are Scaling Faster Than Their Guardrails

A Deloitte survey of 3,235 IT and business leaders across 24 countries finds that only 21% of organisations have a mature governance model for agentic AI, even as nearly three-quarters plan to deploy agents within two years. The gap between deployment speed and oversight maturity creates direct decision-accountability risk at the board level. For SEA mid-market CEOs, this is a clear signal to establish explicit decision-rights boundaries and audit trails for any AI-assisted workflow before scaling.