Extract from Exterro’s article “The AI Control Gap Is Becoming the Channel’s Biggest Opportunity”
I’ve had some version of the same conversation with a dozen different partners over the last few months. A customer got excited about AI, moved fast, and is now quietly asking whether anyone actually knows what it’s doing inside their environment. Usually the answer is no, and usually nobody wants to say that out loud in a steering committee meeting.
That gap between how fast AI is getting deployed and how well anyone is keeping track of it isn’t a phase enterprises will grow out of on their own. It’s shaping up to be the defining risk of this whole AI cycle, and honestly, it might be the best services opportunity I’ve seen come through the channel in a decade.
The Numbers Finally Caught Up to What We Were Already Seeing
For a while this was mostly anecdotal, something partners and IT leaders would mention in passing, usually with a shrug. Now there’s data behind it. IBM recently surveyed 2,000 CIOs and CTOs and found that 70% believe AI is being deployed faster than their teams can track it, and 77% say adoption is already outpacing their governance capacity. Read that twice. That’s not a handful of laggards falling behind; that’s the leadership of most enterprise IT organizations admitting, on the record, that they’ve lost track of their own AI footprint.
