Report by Harness

The State of Agent DLC 2026

18 FINDINGSPublished Sep 10, 2026
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Key Findings

44% of technology professionals at large enterprises run active discovery tooling to verify their inventory of agents, MCP servers, and LLMs.

Inventory ManagementDiscovery ToolingEnterpriseAI AgentsLLM

74% of technology professionals at large enterprises are confident their testing would catch a production-impacting failure.

Inventory ManagementAI AgentsEnterprise

19% of technology professionals at large enterprises have a gate that automatically blocks every bad release.

Release ManagementAutomationEnterpriseAI Agents

76% of technology professionals at large enterprises believe they could disable a misbehaving agent in under 15 minutes.

Incident ResponseAI AgentsEnterprise

33% of technology professionals at large enterprises have an instant kill switch in place for misbehaving agents.

Incident ResponseAI AgentsEnterprise

87% of technology professionals at large enterprises experienced security incidents overall.

Security IncidentsEnterprise

74% of technology professionals at large enterprises say they have a complete picture of true spend per agent.

AI AgentsFinOpsEnterprise

60% of technology professionals at large enterprises overran their budget last quarter.

Budget OverrunsCloud CostsEnterprise

42% of technology professionals at large enterprises run prompt edits through the same pipeline as a code change.

Deployment PipelinesAI AgentsEnterprise

53% of technology professionals at large enterprises route agent-related changes through any standard pipeline before production.

Deployment PipelinesChange ManagementEnterpriseAI Agents

37% of technology professionals at large enterprises run less than half of their agent-related changes through a standard pipeline.

Deployment PipelinesChange ManagementEnterpriseAI Agents

More than 40% of organizations decide case by case whether to trust an agent change.

Change ManagementGovernanceEnterpriseAI Agents

58% of organizations that promote agent changes to production check every change against a fixed, repeatable standard.

Quality AssuranceChange ManagementEnterpriseAI Agents

58% of technology professionals at large enterprises report an increase in production incidents per 100 changes since deploying AI agents.

Production IncidentsAI AgentsEnterprise

75% of technology professionals at large enterprises say their agents are secure end to end.

EnterpriseAI Agents

88% of the technology professionals who say their agents are secure end to end experienced security incidents.

Security IncidentsAI AgentsEnterprise

77% of technology professionals at large enterprises are confident they have a complete inventory of every agent, MCP server, and LLM in their environment.

Inventory ManagementAI AgentsLLMMCP ServerEnterprise

34% of technology professionals at large enterprises have a dedicated configuration system for AI behavior.

Configuration ManagementAI BehaviorEnterpriseAI Agents