The State of AI Friction: Delayed, Diminished, and Ungoverned AI

In a July 2026 study conducted for Protegrity, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) polled 152 IT and security leaders and found that 82% have had security or compliance reviews delay AI getting into production. Two-thirds of those delays run a month or longer. A project that clears review four months late doesn't just arrive late. It arrives scoped against a competitive baseline that has already moved.

Teams are also routing around the gate by shrinking the ask. Fully 81% have shipped AI agents in a restricted state because they couldn't clear the risk in time, with tools switched off, permissions clipped, and autonomy stripped out. The business case was built on the agent at full capability. Something smaller went into production, and that loss never shows up on the P&L.

The third cost runs the other way. 69% are already running agents that write to databases, trigger external APIs, and take action in production. The controls securing those environments, including storage-layer encryption, masking, and role-based access, were built for an era when humans queried the data. The agents have outrun the protection model designed to contain them.

That's the trap. Slow down and you pay in delayed and diminished AI. Speed up and you pay in exposure. And with 88% increasing agentic AI budgets by 10% or more over the next twelve months, the money to make all three worse is already committed.

Join Chris Steffen, VP of Research at EMA, and James Rice, VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at Protegrity, for a candid 30-minute conversation on what the findings mean.

• What months of security review actually cost when the model landscape moves every quarter
• Why diminished AI is the largest line item on your AI budget that isn't on your AI budget
• Where the protection gap sits between the agents you're running and the controls you're running them on
• What EMA recommends enterprises do about it, and what that looks like in production

Bring your CISO. Bring your AI leader. This is the conversation they aren't having.