Something new is showing up in enterprise AI budgets. Not agents. The audit of agents.
A market is forming around agent assurance. Independent third-party review. Runtime monitoring. Even guardian agents whose only job is to watch other agents and rein them in when they drift.
A recent Fact.MR market study projects this assurance market growing about 44 percent a year for the next decade. The single largest buyer is not big tech. It is banking, financial services, and insurance.
That tells you who is nervous. And they have reason to be.
Why the audit market is appearing now
Agents are leaving the lab. They touch loan files. They move money. They talk to customers.
The risk arrived with them. In one survey, 80 percent of organizations said their agents had already taken actions they were not supposed to take. Forrester expects an agentic deployment to cause a publicly disclosed breach this year. It expects the root cause to be governance, not a clever attacker.
Gartner still expects more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027. Cost and weak controls lead the list of reasons.
So the market is doing what markets do. Where there is real risk and no proof, someone steps in to sell proof. That is what agent assurance is.
What assurance can and cannot do
Here is the part that does not fit on the vendor slide.
Assurance attests. It does not create.
A third-party auditor can only confirm discipline that already exists in your system. So can a guardian agent. So can your own internal review. They read the trail you left behind. They cannot write that trail for you after the fact.
Picture a regulated lender. An examiner asks a simple chain of questions. Who approved this decision? Under what identity? With what data? Did the agent stay inside its scope?
If your agents already run on their own identities, with every action logged under their own name, assurance is a confirmation. A clean one.
If your agents share a service account and leave a blurry trail, no assurance vendor can manufacture a clean one. They can only document the gap. And now it is on the record.
What we do, and what I would do this quarter
On our auto loan and credit card origination work, the audit trail is not a deliverable we add at the end. It is a property of the build.
Every agent has its own identity. Every action is scoped and logged under that identity. Nothing is inherited. Nothing is shared. There is a defined point where a human can stop the process, and a record of when they did.
That is not extra work for the auditor’s benefit. It is what makes the system explainable. To an examiner. To a regulator weighing the EU AI Act’s high-risk obligations. To your own board.
So treat the rise of the assurance market as a signal, not a solution.
Inventory your agents this quarter. Give the ones that touch money or customers their own identity. Log their decisions. Define where a human can intervene, and prove it works. Set rollback criteria before you scale, not after an incident. Do that, and third-party assurance becomes an attestation you welcome. Skip it, and assurance becomes an invoice for documenting everything you never built.
Intent in, outcomes out only holds if every outcome traces back to an accountable identity. Assurance is the market putting a price on that traceability. The price is far lower if you build it in.
© Dr. Harish Kotadia, 2026. All Rights Reserved.
Dr. Harish Kotadia, Ph.D., is an Enterprise AI Architect with 20+ years of IT consulting experience serving Fortune 100 clients, specializing in agentic AI systems built on Anthropic Claude, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI. He holds a Ph.D. in Marketing Management with doctoral research in marketing analytics. Follow him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/hkotadia and at AgenticAIArch.com.