54% of companies have already had an incident with AI agents
A report reveals that more than half of companies have already suffered incidents with AI agents — and most still share passwords among them. Understand why security has become an essential skill.
Ilustração: FayAI Studio
A new security report revealed a striking number: 54% of companies using AI agents have already suffered some type of incident with them — from data leaks to wrong actions executed by the system. And the most worrying part: the majority still allow these agents to share passwords and credentials among themselves, as if they were employees swapping the front door key.
AI agents are systems that perform tasks autonomously: they answer customers, access databases, make purchases, and operate other software. In 2026, this became the market's big bet, and companies rushed to deploy agents — often faster than they could create security rules. The result is what researchers call the 'agent security gap': adoption ran ahead of protection.
If you're learning to build agents—whether for your own business, work, or as a freelancer—this statistic is a valuable wake-up call. Knowing how to create an agent that works is no longer enough: knowing how to create a secure agent has become a professional differentiator. Brazilian companies are starting to look for people who truly understand the intersection of AI-powered automation and solid data protection practices.
A common mistake: someone builds a customer service agent that uses the same login and password as a human employee to access the store's system. If that agent gets tricked by a malicious customer—using a technique called prompt injection—the credentials leak, and the damage is severe. The right approach is for each agent to have its own identity, with access limited strictly to what it actually needs to do.
Practical advice: as you build your first agents, treat security as part of the design, not as a final touch. Use dedicated accounts and keys for each agent, limit what they can access, and log everything they do. Keep an eye on future editions of this kind of report: the expectation is that security requirements for agents will become a market standard and even a regulatory issue.
