Companies are wiring up AI agents faster than they can see the bill

KPMG’s latest enterprise AI research, covered this week by CFO Dive, points to a widening gap between how fast companies are deploying AI agents and how well they can account for what those agents cost. The share of organizations running multiple coordinated agents across their workflows has doubled in a single survey cycle, from roughly one in ten to nearly one in five.

Governance hasn’t kept pace with that orchestration. Most companies say they have monitoring dashboards and approval steps in place, but only about a quarter report a full, real-time picture of what their AI systems actually cost to run. As agents start calling other agents, the meter spins in ways finance can’t see until the invoice arrives.

KPMG frames good governance as the connective tissue between scaling agents, getting them to perform, and actually capturing value - essentially Uprovd’s thesis in someone else’s words. Visibility into cost is the floor, not the ceiling: the work that matters is connecting each agent’s spend to the outcome it delivered, so scaling up doesn’t simply mean spending up.