What happened
In 2026, enterprises are transitioning from experimental AI tools to deploying independent, multimodal AI systems capable of reasoning and acting across text, images, audio, and video. Gartner predicts 80% of enterprises will integrate generative AI APIs or applications into production environments. This shift expands AI's operational scope to include personalised customer experiences, process automation, workforce optimisation, content creation, predictive maintenance, intelligent document processing, and supply chain optimisation, with AI agents automating tasks such as invoice processing and anomaly detection.
Why it matters
The deployment of independent, multimodal AI systems and generative AI in production environments introduces a significant control gap for IT security and compliance teams. The autonomous reasoning and action capabilities, coupled with multimodal data processing, increase exposure to less visible operational deviations and data handling complexities. This necessitates higher due diligence requirements for data provenance, model explainability, and output validation, placing an increased oversight burden on data governance and platform operators to ensure adherence to evolving policy frameworks.
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