Firms can’t count their AI agents, let alone switch them off

RSA chief executive Greg Nelson recently asked a room of security chiefs from 20 of RSA’s top enterprise customers if they knew how many artificial intelligence (AI) agents were running inside their organisations.

The CEO of the IT security specialist got no answer. “Not one person could raise their hand,” he said. “Then I asked whether they had a tool to discover them. And again, nobody could say they did.”

Nelson, who has led RSA since September 2025, spoke to Computer Weekly at the World Summit AI conference in Amsterdam, where the supplier presented Agent ID, its platform for discovering and governing AI agents, to a European audience. In his view, the number of agents is growing faster than security teams can keep up. Gartner expects the average global Fortune 500 enterprise to run more than 150,000 agents by 2028, up from fewer than 15 in 2025.

“We had a bank the other day that said, officially, we have zero AI agents – but unofficially, we have 4,000,” said Nelson. And he does not expect it to stop there. “That 4,000 is going to be 8,000 in three months.”

Sprawl outpaces security

For Nelson, those uncounted agents are the biggest security risk that AI brings. “People have no control over the agents,” he said. “Agents are outpacing what security has been able to do.”