{"id":19691,"date":"2026-04-28T08:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T08:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/19691\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T08:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T08:19:08","slug":"how-to-manage-ai-agent-sprawl-a-six-step-framework-by-gartner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/19691\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Manage AI Agent Sprawl: A Six-Step Framework by Gartner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gartner, Inc. has identified six steps to help organizations reduce the risks of AI agent<\/a>\u00a0sprawl.<\/p>\n

Gartner predicts that by 2028, an average global Fortune 500 enterprise will have over 150,000 agents in use, up from less than 15 in 2025, generating significant agent sprawl, IT complexity and management challenges.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs CIOs and IT leaders see an explosion of\u00a0AI agents<\/a>\u00a0across their organizations, many are contending with an ungoverned sprawl of agents that expose their\u00a0organizations to a range of risks, including misinformation, oversharing and data loss,\u201d said\u00a0Max Goss<\/a>, Sr. Director Analyst at Gartner.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany organizations resort to blocking or restricting the use of AI agents, but this is not a long-term solution. If employees are unable to work in the sanctioned tools, they will likely go around the organization\u2019s controls and start using shadow AI which presents far greater risks. Organizations need to find a balance where they can govern agents and manage sprawl, but also safely empower employees to innovate with these tools.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gartner identified\u00a0six steps to help CIOs and IT leaders\u00a0establish governance and guardrails to reduce the risks of\u00a0agent sprawl.<\/p>\n

Establish agent governance and policies:\u00a0Set clear rules for when and how agents are built, who can create and share them, and what connectors are permitted.
\nBuild centralized agent inventory: Organizations can use\u00a0AI trust, risk, and security management (AI TRiSM)<\/a>\u00a0tools to help discover and categorize agents across applications, both from sanctioned tools, and from shadow AI solutions.\u00a0Once organizations have an agent inventory, they can start to build adaptive controls to enforce the right policies based on the level of risk the agent presents.
\nDefine agent identity, permissions and life cycle model:\u00a0Manage the agent identity, permission model and access controls,\u00a0review, and retire redundant agents to prevent uncontrolled sprawl.
\n\u00a0Develop AI information governance:\u00a0Govern what information the AI tool or agent has access to and ensure that there is a process in place to keep the data current, manage its permissions to prevent oversharing, and archive the data when it is obsolete.
\nMonitor and remediate agent behavior:\u00a0Establish ongoing visibility into agent usage, ensure policy compliance, detect anomalous behavior, and correct agents that exceed their intended scope or risk tolerance.
\n\u00a0Foster a culture of responsible AI usage:\u00a0Support\u00a0the workforce with training programs and a community of practice to drive adoption and amplify best practices on agent management across the organization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gartner, Inc. has identified six steps to help organizations reduce the risks of AI agent\u00a0sprawl. Gartner predicts that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[511,405,7537,3545],"class_list":{"0":"post-19691","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-ai-agent","9":"tag-ai-agents","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","11":"tag-gartner"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}