Cisco, a San Jose-based networking and security company, warns that the rush to deploy AI agents is outpacing companies’ ability to monitor them, and unpredictable bills are now a bigger headache than high ones. The findings come from its Splunk State of Observability 2026 report, released on October 20.
Oxford Economics surveyed 2,050 IT operations (ITOps) and engineering professionals in 10 countries, including the UK, between February and March.
“Most companies will soon have far more agents at work than people,” said Jeetu Patel, Cisco's president and chief product officer. “Managing agents at scale requires reimagining both security and observability.”
The report found that 55% of respondents could not accurately control their AI costs.
An additional 60% said unexpected billing spikes caused more operational strain than high baseline costs, while 57% said telemetry costs had overtaken the infrastructure they were monitoring.
“For today’s enterprises, the excitement of AI is clashing with the reality of the bill,” said Kamal Hathi, senior vice president and general manager of Splunk at Cisco. “We believe observability is the essential bridge to restoring predictability and confidence to the agentic AI era.”
Concern is widespread, with 83% of respondents worried about AI agents' unintended consequences.
While 87% said monitoring AI was a priority, 54% had no clear business outcomes tied to it. More than half (56%) could not measure metrics such as large language model (LLM) response quality, and while 85% said visibility into hallucinations was important, only 58% said they tracked them effectively.
Monitoring AI has also pulled IT and security teams closer, with 81% saying it had increased collaboration. Joint troubleshooting rose to 77% from 62% in 2025.
“This report shows that observability and security data are converging, and that teams need to collaborate more than ever,” said Patel. “Common data platforms that help us detect and respond to issues in real-time are the key to deploying agents we can trust at scale.”
Some 32% of UK respondents said they used AI agents all the time to diagnose root causes, compared with 20% globally. At the same time, 55% said they were strongly worried about agents' unintended consequences.
Elsewhere, 51% of Indian firms said their monitoring of AI model quality was very effective, compared with 35% globally. In Saudi Arabia, 98% said AI let them focus more on innovation, while 74% of German respondents rated visibility into AI privacy as very important.
The report identified a group of leaders who closely monitor model quality, cost and security. Of these, 91% could accurately attribute AI costs to specific agents and models, compared with 69% of other firms.