Overview

• EY’s latest survey finds 21% of senior leaders have already spent $10 million or more on AI, about one-third expect to cross that mark next year, yet only 14% report full agentic AI implementation.
• Consultants distinguish agentic systems that plan and execute multi‑step work autonomously from prompt‑driven assistants, underscoring why many organizations struggle to scope and govern real deployments.
• This week Google introduced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) with more than 60 partners, using cryptographically signed Intent and Cart Mandates to authorize and audit agent‑initiated transactions; participants include Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, PayPal and Worldpay.
• Core blockers persist across reliability, real‑time data access, model reasoning, security/privacy and legacy integration, even as vendors like Snowflake, Salesforce and dbt Labs push a new shared standard for defining and exchanging business data.
• An MIT report cites a 95% pilot‑to‑production failure rate for GenAI, reinforcing calls to design for friction with human feedback loops, explicit oversight points and enterprise‑grade cybersecurity and compliance controls.