It's time to put AI agents to work, say industry observers, and things will happen first. IDC FutureScape predicts that by 2026, 40% of all G2000 job roles will involve working with AI agents, redefining long-held traditional entry, mid and senior level positions.
By 2028, IDC FutureScape predicts that pure seat-based pricing will be obsolete as AI agents rapidly replace manual repetitive tasks with digital labour, forcing 70% of vendors to refactor their value proposition into new models.
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| Source: TeamViewer. Steil. |
"Agentic AI is making this shift possible. Instead of generic, open-ended models prone to hallucinations, organisations are deploying specialised agents trained on company-specific data to perform focused, high-value tasks. The broad ambition of the past few years is giving way to targeted efficiency, and 2026 will be the moment ROI shows up not in theory, but in the real world.”
"After a year of pilots and prototypes, 2026 will mark the tipping point where AI agents start driving tangible business outcomes. Enterprises are moving beyond experimentation to full-scale adoption, especially in the financial services sector where use cases span everything from source-of-wealth assistants to intelligent fraud prevention systems," said Remus Lim, Senior VP, Asia Pacific & Japan, Cloudera.
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| Source: Cloudera. Lim. |
"According to a recent global report from Finextra Research, commissioned by Cloudera, 97% of financial services firms now have at least one AI/machine learning (ML) use case in production, signalling that AI has moved from emerging trend to business essential. Yet, nearly half remain stuck in the 'middle stage' of maturity, where scaling, governance, and cost control become key barriers.
"The next frontier lies in operationalising AI agents at scale. This means connecting them to real-time, governed data, and integrating them across business workflows. Enterprises that get this right will unlock automation that is not just intelligent, but context-aware, traceable, and secure."
AI sprawl
Arvind Nithrakashyap, Co-Founder and CTO, Rubrik, said that the proliferation of AI agents is creating 'AI sprawl', forcing IT and security teams to reconcile rapid deployment with system control.
"The dynamic will necessitate a governance renaissance in 2026 and immediate, focused investment to bring agents into production safely and at scale," he said.
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| Source: Rubrik. Nithrakashyap. |
"To achieve production-grade agent deployment, organisations must rapidly implement monitoring and governance controls to ensure visibility into which applications or data agents are accessing and that they adhere to corporate policies. Inevitably, agents will make mistakes, and they will need to have remediation strategies in place."
Security and governance
"Organisations will need to overhaul their current IT and security workforce management," Nithrakashyap added.
"In 2026, heavy investment in robust security and governance systems will be essential to monitor, control, and remediate agent output."
Ananth Nag, VP and GM, APAC, Rubrik, said that 2026 will see Singaporean organisations shift from cautious experimentation to broader adoption of agentic AI, even in conservative industries. "Delaying adoption poses risks, as threat actors are already leveraging AI agents. Success hinges on balancing innovation with resilience, requiring full visibility and control over AI agents to ensure safe and orchestrated workflows," he said.
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| Source: Rubrik. Nag. |
Security use cases will benefit significantly from agents, Kaspersky said. "Agent-based systems will be able to continuously scan infrastructure, identify vulnerabilities, and gather contextual information for investigations, reducing the amount of manual routine work.
"As a result, specialists will shift from manually searching for data to making decisions based on already-prepared context. In parallel, security tools will transition to natural-language interfaces, enabling prompts instead of complex technical queries," the company noted.
Agents as attack targets
Palo Alto Networks raised the possibility of a new cybersecurity vulnerability - instead of humans as targets, AI agents may become more valuable to cybercriminals. "Enterprise adoption of autonomous AI agents will finally provide the force multiplier needed to solve the 4.8 million-person cyber skills gap and end alert fatigue. This is also an inherent risk, creating a potent new insider threat," the company said in its list of 2026 predictions.
"These always-on, implicitly trusted agents are given privileged access and the keys to the kingdom, instantly becoming the most valuable target. Adversaries will no longer make humans their primary target; they will look to compromise these powerful agents, turning them into an 'autonomous insider'. This forces a shift to autonomy with control, requiring AI firewall governance tools at runtime to stop machine-speed attacks and ensure the AI workforce isn't turned against its owners."
“Rapid adoption of agentic AI across IT operations will increase efficiencies but also create new high-value hacking targets,” agreed Lee Anstiss, Regional Director, Southeast Asia and Korea, Infoblox.
Marshall Erwin, CISO at Fastly, said the blurring line between human and bot activity has repercussions for security and the Internet as a whole.
"When websites and systems can no longer accurately distinguish between human users and AI agents, traditional authentication and access control methods will falter because you can’t secure what you can’t see. Malicious bot-driven attacks will become harder to identify, and it will become more difficult to respond and filter malicious traffic without potentially blocking wanted bot traffic important to businesses," he said.
API vulnerabilities
API fragility is another "critical fault line beneath agentic AI", said Mohan Veloo, CTO, Asia-Pacific, China & Japan, F5. "Organisations in the region must close the widening gap between AI ambition and security execution. Continuous API discovery, consistent policy enforcement, and real-time visibility into AI-driven traffic patterns will be essential for scaling intelligence safely," he said.
Forrester goes so far as to predict that an agentic AI deployment in 2026 will cause a public breach and lead to employee dismissals. "Since its launch in 2022, gen AI has caused several data breaches or affected the integrity or availability of sensitive data. As companies begin building agentic AI workflows, these issues will only become more prevalent," said Paddy Harrington, Senior Analyst, Forrester, in a set of 2026 predictions.
"Without the right guardrails, systems of autonomous AI agents may sacrifice accuracy for speed of delivery, especially when interacting directly with customers. When these failures occur, some treat AI agents as their own entities while others point fingers at individual employees, but breaches like these are due to a cascade of failures, not a single individual. To prevent these failures, and scapegoating, security organisations must enable the business to develop agentic applications with minimum viable security.
"Follow the AEGIS framework, securing intent, ensuring appropriate identity and access management controls to track agent activity, and implementing data security controls to track data provenance."
“The paradigm shift to agentic AI in APJ is accelerating. Enterprises are increasingly looking to leverage agentic automation workflows and deploy AI agents to improve productivity, efficiency, and business growth.
"In 2026, companies that succeed with AI won’t be the ones with the flashiest pilots. They’ll be the ones with the best deployment strategy to orchestrate people, processes, and technology together, all in a framework that’s well-governed and trustworthy,” said Amit Khandelwal, Regional VP and MD for Southeast Asia, UiPath.
APJ is an acronym for Asia Pacific and Japan. G2000 refers to the top 2000 companies globally, while a source-of-wealth assistant is a tool used to speed up know-your-customer (KYC) procedures in private banking.
Hashtag: #2026Predictions
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