McKinsey's 2026 AI Trust Maturity Survey, drawn from roughly 500 organizations surveyed between December 2025 and January 2026, tracks how companies are managing risk as they move from testing AI tools to deploying autonomous, agentic systems inside core business functions.

The survey found that nearly two-thirds of respondents cite security and risk concerns as the top barrier to fully scaling agentic AI, ahead of regulatory uncertainty and technical limitations. McKinsey's researchers describe this as a confidence problem: organizations have run enough pilots to know agentic AI works, and the open question is whether they can deploy it safely at scale.

Seventy-four percent of respondents named inaccuracy and 72 percent named cybersecurity as highly relevant risks, and McKinsey found that active mitigation of those risks consistently lags behind how relevant organizations rate them, a gap that widens further for intellectual property and privacy risks. The average responsible AI maturity score across surveyed organizations rose to 2.3 in 2026 from 2.0 in 2025, but only about 30 percent of organizations reached a maturity level of three or higher in strategy, governance, and agentic AI controls specifically.

Organizations that assigned explicit ownership for responsible AI, through a dedicated governance role or an internal audit function, reported average maturity scores of 2.6, compared to 1.8 for organizations without clear accountability. McKinsey's researchers frame that gap as evidence that governance structure now determines how quickly a company can scale agentic AI.

Source: McKinsey & Company - https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/tech-forward/state-of-ai-trust-in-2026-shifting-to-the-agentic-era