IBM survey finds AI incidents reach senior leaders for eight in ten surveyed executives

Censuswide conducted the IBM study among 3,221 executive-management respondents, including C-level executives, at organizations with at least 1,000 employees.[1] It covered the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.[1] Data was collected between Sept. 14 and 24, 2026.[1] Eight in ten respondents said an AI-related incident had reached their board or C-suite during the previous year.[1] IBM’s examples of incidents included agent failures, data exposure, AI-driven decision errors and AI security breaches.[1]

IBM reports that 56% of surveyed executives said they press ahead with deployment within agreed risk limits.[1] One-third said they delay deployment until governance is ready when deployment moves faster than governance readiness.[1] At the same time, 37% said their current governance system is designed to scale with agentic AI deployment.[1] Among organizations whose AI incident reached senior leadership, 40% cited a change to their AI governance policy or framework in response.[1] Separately, 37% of respondents had a formal, board-reviewed quantification of the financial risk created by AI governance gaps.[1]

At the time of the survey, 35% of respondents said they were running agentic AI in production, and three-quarters expected AI agents to have some autonomy over decisions by 2027.[1] Although 98% said responsibility for AI risk had been formally assigned at board level, 26% reported having a dedicated board-level AI committee.[1] The CIO or CTO was the most frequently cited role for responsibility for adverse AI-agent outcomes, selected by 17% of respondents.[1] Respondents also cited vendor-liability frameworks, human escalation thresholds, real-time monitoring, audit trails and the ability to halt agent activity as governance measures.[1]

IBM says 41% of surveyed EU executives were accelerating governance investment ahead of the EU AI Act’s high-risk obligations in December 2027.[1] Sector-regulator expectations were the most cited driver of AI-governance investment among UK respondents, at 27%.[1] In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, national AI strategy requirements were the leading reported investment driver, at 61%.[1] The report also names a deployment example: Santander deployed a global AI Governance Platform built on watsonx.governance and watsonx Orchestrate across all its operating countries.[2]