A warning sign for organisations and AI spending

The pervasiveness of AI means that every organisation either needs to be leveraging the technology or actively exploring ways to do so, regardless of what the desired outcome is.

This rudderless approach appears to be having an impact on the bottom line, as feedback from Cisco’s Splunk State of Observability 2026 report reveals.

The headline grabbing figure from the report relates to AI spending, with 55 percent of organisations surveyed stating that they have no control over it.

With this year’s report surveying 2 050 ITOps and engineering respondents across 10 countries, it shows that this issue is not isolated to one specific industry or region. As such, when it comes to controlling AI spending, the majority of organisations are struggling to keep things in check.

“With AI costs becoming more volatile, organizations are struggling to maintain both agent quality and fiscal predictability. This year’s report highlights how observability is helping to restore stability and financial predictability of agentic AI systems, providing the governance to build trust with agents and ensure AI spend is tethered to business value,” noted Cisco in a release to Hypertext.

Exacerbating matters, the report also identified that 83 percent of respondents have voiced concerns about the unintended consequences of AI agents. More specifically, there is an increasing desire to have greater control over what agents do within the organisation’s ecosystem, or more accurately, to have better guardrails in place to govern how agentic AI operates.

“Most companies will soon have far more agents at work than people. Managing agents at scale requires reimagining both security and observability. Have our agents been compromised? Are they doing their job well? In the world of agentic AI, these questions are inseparable, and they’re moving at machine speed,” explained Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco.

“This report shows that observability and security data are converging, and that teams need to collaborate more than ever. Common data platforms that help us detect and respond to issues in real-time are the key to deploying agents we can trust at scale,” he added.

Some of the other numbers related to rising AI-related costs include the fact that 60 percent of respondents found unexpected billing spikes cause more operational strain. Added to this, 57 percent highlighted that their telemetry costs surpassed the cost of the infrastructure being monitored, which has meant organisations must make financial predictability a core focus.

Moving forward, there looks to be an uncomfortable period for many organisations heavily invested in AI, and agents in particular. During this time, all organisations will need to understand how to make agent observability more viable, and gain greater control on spending.

“Unlike monitoring traditional applications, visibility into AI agent behavior requires a new class of behavioral metrics that are tied to business outcomes and agent decision-making. While many see the value of agent observability technology, respondents still struggle with how to execute or measure the tools effectively,” Cisco pointed out.

To download (PDF) and read the report for yourself, head here.

[Image – Photo by Paul Campbell on Unsplash]

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