Airia Recognized in Forrester’s “The Agentic Control Plane Solutions Landscape, Q2 2026”

We’re pleased to share that Airia has been included as a notable vendor in Forrester’s “The Agentic Control Plane Solutions Landscape, Q2 2026.” We see this as a meaningful signal — not just for Airia, but for where enterprise AI governance is heading. The agentic control plane is being recognized as a distinct and necessary category precisely because the governance problem enterprises face is real, urgent, and getting harder to ignore.

The Governance Gap Is Already Here

Here is what we hear from almost every enterprise AI or security team we speak with: agents are already running in production across their environment, and no one has a complete picture of what’s there. Some were sanctioned and built centrally. Many weren’t. Copilots embedded in SaaS tools, departmental automation, third-party integrations — they accumulate quietly, each operating with its own access and its own behavior, with no common governance layer tying them together.

As Forrester puts it: “Buyers can’t govern agents they can’t see; most enterprises significantly underestimate their AI footprint. Agents proliferate through copilots, embedded SaaS features, departmental builds, and shadow projects that never reach a central inventory. The first job of a control plane is detection — finding every agent across runtimes before any policy can attach to it.”

This is the challenge that makes agent governance categorically different from prior generations of IT governance. You are not managing a known, bounded set of systems. You are managing a population that is actively growing, in ways that are partially invisible, across surfaces your organization may not fully control.

Why Platform-Native Controls Cannot Solve This

The instinct when governance is missing is to look to the platforms themselves. Each hyperscaler, each SaaS vendor, each orchestration framework has its own controls built in. The problem is that those controls stop at the edge of that vendor’s ecosystem. They don’t extend across a mixed estate — which is the only kind of estate that actually exists in enterprise environments today.

The result is fragmentation: inconsistent policies, siloed telemetry, no unified audit trail, and no single answer to the question of which agents exist, what they can do, and who is accountable for them. Security and risk teams end up governing the agents they can see while remaining blind to the ones they can’t.

This is why the agentic control plane exists as a distinct layer — and why it must sit above the runtimes rather than within them. Forrester defines it as: “A common enterprise governance and control platform that sits above and across a heterogeneous estate of AI agents and agentic skills and applies a consistent envelope of oversight, governance, and controls so the agent portfolio can be managed consistently across platforms, vendors, and use cases.”

That above-and-across position is not incidental to the definition. It is the definition. A control plane that only governs some of your agents does not close the governance gap — it relocates it.

What Governance Actually Requires at Runtime

Governing AI agents is not the same as governing software. Software executes instructions. Agents make decisions, chain actions, and can behave differently than they were designed to behave — especially when the context they operate in changes. Periodic review does not work here. By the time you audit what an agent did last week, it has already acted in ways that cannot be undone.

Effective governance requires three things that traditional IT oversight frameworks were not designed to provide:

Enforcement at the moment of execution. Policy has to apply before an action is taken, not after it is logged. When an agent is about to escalate a decision, access a sensitive resource, or take an action outside its defined scope, the control plane needs to intercept that action in real time — block it, flag it for human review, or allow it based on current policy — not record it for later analysis.

Unified inventory with defined ownership. Every agent in the enterprise needs a registered identity — what it is, what it can access, who owns it, and what policies apply to it. Without this, accountability is impossible. When something goes wrong, you need to be able to answer immediately: which agent, under whose ownership, acting under what authorization. An inventory that only covers some runtimes is not an inventory.

Auditable behavior and cost lineage. Regulators, auditors, and risk committees increasingly want to trace specific outcomes back to specific agents, policies, and decisions. Finance teams want to know what each agent is spending. Neither question can be answered without a control plane that records performance, token and tool consumption, and audit trails consistently across every runtime in the estate.

How Airia Approaches This

Airia is purpose-built to be the governance layer that sits above and across an enterprise’s agent estate — regardless of which runtimes, orchestration frameworks, or vendors are in use. We serve customers across financial services, media and telecommunications, and professional services in North America and EMEA: industries where ungoverned AI action carries real regulatory and operational risk, and where the expectations around auditability are already taking shape.

We offer flexible deployment options — hosted private SaaS, multitenant SaaS, and on-premises — because data residency and security requirements in regulated industries are real constraints that governance infrastructure has to accommodate. Our extended use case focus reflects what these customers are actually asking us to solve:

• Change risk management — understanding the downstream impact of modifying an agent or its configuration before making changes in production
• Compliance and regulatory audit — maintaining the evidence trail that regulators and internal audit functions require
• Cross-runtime agent management — consistent policy enforcement and visibility across every platform and vendor in the estate, not just the ones with native governance built in

Build the Governance Layer Before You Need It

Agent estates grow faster than governance programs do. The organizations that struggle most are those that treated governance as something to retrofit once their agent footprint became too complex to ignore — by which point they are dealing with dozens of runtimes, inconsistent ownership records, no unified audit trail, and regulators who are starting to ask hard questions.

The organizations best positioned for what comes next — whether that’s a security incident, a regulatory exam, or simply scaling AI into more critical workflows — are the ones that treated governance as a foundational requirement and built the control layer early, when it is still tractable.

Forrester’s recognition of this category reflects something we have seen firsthand: the governance problem is not theoretical, and the window to get ahead of it is narrower than most teams think.

If you’re thinking through what an agentic control plane looks like for your environment, we’d welcome the conversation. Request a demo with our team.

_Source:_The Agentic Control Plane Solutions Landscape, Q2 2026, Forrester Research, Inc., June 24, 2026

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivityhere.