Organizations lack the trust layer required to scale artificial intelligence ( AI ) safely, as governance gaps, deployment delays and AI-generated data are compounding the challenge, according to a recent report.

AI has scaled into everyday work, and organizations have less visibility into what employees are using than they did a year ago, finds AI data protection firm AvePoint’s Third annual State of AI Report.

Up to one in five organizations don’t know whether employees are using unsanctioned AI tools, the report notes, a visibility gap that has nearly tripled since 2025 for generative AI ( 6.3% to 17.6% ) and is even higher for AI agents at 21.1%.

More than four in five organizations are confident in their ability to prevent unauthorized AI-related data access, the report points out; yet, up to 72% of confident organizations still experienced an unauthorized access incident in the past 12 months.

Nearly nine in 10 organizations delayed both agentic and generative AI deployments by an average of almost six months, the report adds, citing data security and governance concerns as the primary cause.

And 35.5% of enterprise data is now AI-generated, the report finds; this figure is expected to reach 42.1% within 12 months, expanding the surface that governance must cover.

As well, 46.9% of employees rely on AI agents daily or weekly, yet 88.4% of organizations experienced at least one agent-related security incident in the past year.

“Nearly half of global employees are already relying on AI agents weekly or daily, and organizations are deploying agents faster than they are building the foundations required to trust them,” states Tianyi Jiang, AvePoint’s CEO. “The constraint on enterprise AI is no longer model capability, but whether organizations have built a trust layer: the data visibility, governance and enforceable control required to scale AI with confidence. Without it, speed of deployment becomes speed of exposure.”