Building the right foundation for your AI strategy
3 minute read
Lee Brown
June 18th, 2026
Microsoft research suggests many organisations are significantly increasing AI investment, with some planning to allocate around 10–15% of technology budgets to AI and agentic initiatives. Industry forecasts also indicate rapid growth, with more than 1.3 billion AI agents expected to be in use by 2028.
Gartner’s July 2024 forecast reports: “At least 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025, due to poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs or unclear business value.”.
Many of the challenges identified here are non-technical and project stall or abandonment are often down to a lack of strategic governance, a defined responsibility model, and decision making around the key strategic areas.
The root cause lies in gaps across policy, governance, and organisational processes. These include:
- The absence of a strong governance framework to support AI/Agent adoption at scale
- Ineffective or undefined processes for identifying and prioritising outcome-based use cases that deliver real value
- A lack of security and compliance controls to prevent agent sprawl and unmanaged, organic growth
- Insufficient business oversight and visibility to ensure agents remain relevant and fit for purpose post-deployment
Without addressing these foundational elements, organisations risk deploying AI solutions that fail to scale or remain aligned to evolving business needs over time.
Technology can enforce governance, but only if you define it first
Recommended platforms such as Microsoft Agent365 and Microsoft AI Foundry provide powerful controls to observe, govern, and secure how AI and agents operate. But these tools govern based on instruction, they need a clear strategic brief to work from.
If your organisation hasn’t agreed on priorities, boundaries, and accountability before deployment, even the best governance tooling will have nothing meaningful to enforce. The infrastructure is only as strong as the strategy behind it.
How to effectively adopt AI
To enable effective, at-scale adoption of AI and agents and support the deployment of governance enforcing technical solutions, your organisation should establish a strategic forum, or centre of excellence (CoE). This forum should bring together key business and IT stakeholders to:
- Define organisational priorities
- Set strategic direction for outcome-based AI initiatives
- Identify and align on high-value use cases
- Drive responsible adoption
- Adopt a secure by design methodology rather than treating it as an afterthought or bolt on
This strategy and planning is considered the “work before the work”, where any agents are built and deployed ahead of AI and agents becoming ubiquitous.
By taking this structured approach, your organisation can ensure that requirements are driven by clear business outcomes. These outcome focused requirements can then be consistently integrated into solution design, supporting both value realisation and governance objectives.
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About the author
Lee Brown, Head of Cyber Security Consulting.
Lee leads a team of Security Technical Consultants and Architects in the design and delivery of cloud security and information protection solutions. With a strong focus on strategy, collaboration and real‑world problem solving, Lee plays a key role in shaping security thinking and helping organisations protect what matters most in the cloud.