Data security and privacy concerns topped the list of factors shaping near-term strategy, cited by 91% of respondents. Pressure from investors or boards to demonstrate value came second at 87%, followed by access to lower-cost large language models at 84%, workforce limitations at 82%, and the need to improve client experience and engagement at 81%.<\/p>\n
Despite the scale of investment, actual deployment of AI agents remains limited. Only 19% of firms are currently scaling or orchestrating agents across multiple functions, while more than half are still in the piloting phase. Employee adoption fell sharply quarter over quarter, dropping to 22% from 37%, and more than a third of firms reported outright resistance from staff.<\/p>\n
Skills and capability gaps drove that resistance in 67% of cases, followed by job security concerns and increased workload complexity, each cited by 60%. Trust and transparency issues accounted for 43%. Against that backdrop, 83% of organizations said they are either already investing in reskilling programs or plan to do so. More than half said they would pay between 6% and 15% more for candidates who can demonstrate strong AI capabilities.<\/p>\n
The barriers to scaling agents are predominantly structural. Data readiness and access was flagged by 57% of respondents as a primary obstacle, while AI cost and economic literacy and the complexity of agentic systems were each cited by 49%.<\/p>\n
Governance and cost visibility present an additional challenge. While 63% of respondents said AI operating costs are at least partially visible, only 4% reported full visibility. Monitoring dashboards are in place at 61% of firms, and 58% incorporate cost review into AI approval processes, but usage or token budgets have been adopted by just 18%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Data security and privacy concerns topped the list of factors shaping near-term strategy, cited by 91% of respondents.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[24,405,7537,4471,5807],"class_list":["post-89286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-asset-managers","tag-kpmg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89286","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=89286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}