40% of organisations have suffered an AI-related compliance or governance issue in the last 12 months, with legacy and poorly designed business processes identified as the leading cause, according to new research from Camunda.
The study found that process-related issues contributed to 84% of the compliance and governance failures organisations reported. Employees appear acutely aware of the risk: 79% said they fear their own use of AI could trigger a compliance issue at their organization, while 96% expect process-related challenges to fuel future AI compliance problems.
Almost half of organisations (48%) also expressed concern about AI agents “going rogue” if they are allowed to make changes to a process, reflecting broader anxiety about handing autonomous systems control of operational workflows.
A gap between adoption and governance
The findings, published in Camunda’s report The AI Process Gap, point to a widening gulf between the pace of AI adoption and organizations’ ability to govern it. Daniel Meyer, CIO at Camunda, said the more pressing danger isn’t runaway AI agents but organizations failing to adapt their own operations quickly enough.
“There is a lot of debate about rogue AI agents and whether innovation is moving too fast. But the more immediate risk is that many organisations are not changing the way they work fast enough to keep pace with AI,” Meyer said. He warned that bolting AI onto processes “designed for a pre-AI world” has created a dangerous gap between adoption speed and governance strength, leaving organizations more exposed to compliance failures, regulatory scrutiny and costly penalties.
The cost of broken processes
The report quantifies the fallout: 72% of organisations say process-related challenges have already caused AI initiatives to fail outright, at an average cost of $1.55 million per business. A further 72% believe AI costs will spiral unless organisations gain tighter control over their business processes, and 82% think their AI investments will ultimately be a bust without heavier investment in process redesign.
Despite this, most organisations are taking the path of least resistance. Rather than rebuilding processes from the ground up around AI, 79% say simply layering AI onto existing workflows generates less internal pushback, even though 82% acknowledge that adapting all their critical processes for AI could take up to five years.
Kurt Petersen, SVP Customer Success at Camunda, said the pattern is a predictable source of disappointing returns. “Organisations are rapidly adopting AI. But they are applying it to processes designed for a world before AI, then wondering why the return on investment falls short,” Petersen said. He noted that 61% of respondents say business process redesign simply cannot keep pace with the speed at which they need to move on AI, pushing many teams toward “the quick fix of bolting AI onto processes that were never built for it.” Processes designed before the AI era, he added, “cannot support the technology effectively without being re-engineered, no matter how much is spent on agents and models.”
