Omdia survey of 300+ enterprise IT decision-makers exposes a widening gap between agentic AI adoption and the telemetry infrastructure required to support it
- Enterprises anticipate an average 9.5x increase in telemetry data from agentic AI workloads within two years, with 44% expecting 6x to 100x growth; yet nearly two-thirds are only "somewhat prepared" or worse for that surge
- 54% of enterprises already saw telemetry data volume triple in the past 12 months; AI/ML now accounts for ~43% of all telemetry growth and that share is rising
- Enterprises report spending an average of $3.17M annually on observability and 81% are actively seeking cost-cutting alternatives
- 59% of enterprises have already terminated or delayed an agentic AI deployment because observability costs were too high, shelving cybersecurity, compliance, and fraud detection agents that carry the highest cost of being left unmonitored
- Enterprises that have adopted a telemetry pipeline are 50% more likely to be prepared for agentic AI data growth, making pipeline infrastructure the single most important readiness differentiator
- 68% of enterprises plan to evaluate observability solution changes within six months; the buying window is open now
STOCKHOLM and NEW YORK, June 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Apica, the agentic-ready telemetry data management company, today released findings from a new Omdia research study, commissioned by Apica and fielded by Omdia/Informa TechTarget, that quantifies the scale of the telemetry data challenge enterprises face as agentic AI moves from pilot to production. The report, based on a survey of 300+ enterprise IT decision-makers across North America and Western Europe, reveals a stark gap between agentic AI adoption and the infrastructure required to support it, one that is larger, more urgent, and more consequential than most IT leaders have accounted for. Western European respondents, spanning the UK, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, represent nearly half of the survey base, making this one of the most comprehensive cross-Atlantic studies of enterprise telemetry readiness to date. Uniquely, all respondents held direct budgetary or decision-making authority over their organization's observability investments.
Download the full report here
THE TELEMETRY EXPLOSION IS ALREADY HERE
The report's opening finding is a present-tense crisis, not a forecast. The majority of enterprises - 54% - saw their telemetry data volume triple in the past 12 months alone, with estimated average growth of 3.7x year over year. AI and machine learning workloads now account for approximately 43% of that growth, making AI the single largest driver of telemetry expansion in enterprise environments.
83% of enterprises ranked AI observability as a top priority for 2026, scoring it an 8 or higher on a 10-point scale. The priority is clear. The infrastructure to support it, in most organizations, is not.
AGENTIC AI IS THE ACCELERANT
The most consequential finding in the report is the gap between agentic AI adoption claims and infrastructure reality. Survey respondents anticipate an average 9.5x increase in telemetry data from agentic AI workloads within two years and 44% expect growth of 6x to 100x. The range itself is the signal: Nobody can bound this problem, which makes it more alarming than any single ceiling figure.
Despite this, nearly two-thirds of organizations are only "somewhat prepared" or worse for the data volumes agentic AI will generate. More than one in five have not even considered the data implications. And 35% of enterprises report widespread agentic AI deployment despite the technology having existed as an enterprise category only since 2024, a finding analysts flagged as reflecting competitive pressure rather than genuine infrastructure readiness.
Critically, organizations unfamiliar with agentic AI are 4.5x less likely to be prepared for the data volumes it generates, meaning the organizations most at risk are also the least likely to know it.
"The data confirms what we've been telling enterprise IT leaders since April: Agentic AI doesn't just change how you use observability. It breaks the architecture underneath it. A 9.5x data surge in two years is not an IT footnote, it's a board-level infrastructure decision. The organizations that treat the pipeline as the control layer now, before the wave hits, are the ones that will be able to deploy AI agents in production with confidence, cost control, and governance. That's what Apica Ascent is built for."
- Andi Mann, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Apica
THE COST CRISIS IS REAL AND ESCALATING
The report maps the telemetry explosion directly to a compounding budget crisis. Enterprises report spending an average of $3.17M annually on observability. Nearly 20% exceed $5M. And 81% are actively seeking cost-cutting alternatives, not because they want less visibility, but because legacy platforms cannot sustainably absorb AI-scale data volumes at their current pricing models.
Observability budgets are growing an average of 28% year over year; for 35% of enterprises, that growth exceeds 52% annually. Combined with the anticipated 9.5x agentic AI data surge, this creates a cost trajectory with no natural ceiling absent architectural change.
Most strikingly, the research reveals that in 69% of agentic AI projects, observability costs already exceed compute and infrastructure costs combined, inverting the conventional assumption about where AI project spending concentrates.
The consequences are already materializing: 59% of organizations have terminated or delayed at least one agentic AI deployment because monitoring costs were too high. The agents most likely to be shelved are not experimental ones: Cybersecurity, legal and compliance, and fraud detection top the list of paused use cases, meaning the cost of leaving them unmonitored is measured in business risk, not just IT budget.
"Scalability is the main reason why people can't have agentic projects. They have no way of deploying them without exposing themselves to operational, legal, and security risk. I don't see any point of diminishing returns or any slow downward trend in data volume growth. Organizations that don't address their telemetry pipeline architecture now will find themselves making a binary choice: Pay runaway observability costs or run their AI deployments blind."
- Torsten Volk, Principal Analyst, Omdia
THE PIPELINE IS THE ANSWER AND THE MARKET KNOWS IT
The survey's solution findings validate the architectural direction Apica has championed. 54% of enterprises have already implemented a telemetry pipeline solution, and 97% have implemented or are actively evaluating one, confirming the pipeline not as an emerging concept but as the market's consensus response to the telemetry data crisis.
The performance advantage of pipeline adoption is measurable: Organizations that have adopted a telemetry pipeline are 50% more likely to be prepared for the scale of data growth agentic AI will demand within 24 months. Among mature agentic AI organizations (those with widespread deployment), pipeline adoption is a defining characteristic: They are 80% more likely to have avoided the operational cost challenges that constrain organizations still in earlier stages of agentic AI deployment.
Pipeline solutions deliver across every dimension enterprises measure: Multi-cloud and hybrid support (78%), cost reduction (77%), performance handling at scale (76%), and data quality (76%). These benefits map directly to Apica Flow's intelligent routing, filtering, enrichment, and cost optimization capabilities.
The top pipeline purchase drivers identified by buyers, multi-destination routing (47%), data reduction and sampling (43%), and content-based routing (41%), are all core capabilities of Apica Flow. And nearly 25% of buyers say existing vendor relationships are not a significant factor in their decision, signaling that the pipeline evaluation market will be won on capability and thought leadership.
THE DECISION WINDOW IS NOW
The buying window is open. 68% of enterprises plan to evaluate changes to their observability solutions within six months. 70% plan to evaluate telemetry pipeline solutions in the same window. The enterprises reading this report are, in large majority, already in or entering an active evaluation cycle.
The research report is available now. To download the full findings and benchmark your organization's agentic readiness, visit this link.
To learn how Apica Ascent delivers the pipeline-first architecture the research validates, or to explore a personalized cost savings assessment, visit apica.io/demo or contact your Apica account team.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Download the Omdia Research Report here
- Apica Ascent 2.16 launch announcement
- Apica CEO Blog: Is Your Observability Infrastructure Agentic-Ready?
- Schedule a demo
ABOUT APICA
Apica provides agentic-ready infrastructure purpose-built for the AI era. Apica helps enterprises take control of exploding telemetry volumes by providing the pipeline control, metrics foundation, and data readiness that AI agents demand, at up to 40% lower total cost of ownership than legacy observability platforms. Unlike platform-centric solutions that ingest everything indiscriminately and charge at every step, Apica's pipeline-first architecture processes, enriches, and governs telemetry before costly platform ingestion, giving enterprises clean, governed, real-time data without vendor lock-in. Apica Ascent, the only complete telemetry data management product suite purpose-built for agentic AI environments, serves global enterprises across financial services, healthcare, retail, telecommunications, and technology sectors.
Recognized as a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms. Learn more at www.apica.io or visit docs.apica.io.
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