September 23, 2026
The Owner of the Agent
61.8% of Brazilian companies have AI agents in pilot or operation, but 55.1% don't measure ROI. Before scaling, every agent needs an owner.
Pick an AI agent at your company, in pilot or already in operation, and ask who owns it and how much it costs per month. In Zappts' survey, 61.8% of Brazilian companies have agents in those two phases: 13.8% have scaled in operations and 48% are somewhere between pilot and scale.
The Panorama da IA no Brasil surveyed 167 executives, recruited through the channels of Zappts itself, a consultancy that sells AI agent projects. The share of companies that don't measure AI ROI nearly doubled in a year, from 30.6% to 55.1%. In the same survey, 26.2% have no defined budget for agents, and 55.2% have no AI gateway. Pablo Augusto, Zappts' CEO, says AI agents "are not just isolated IT projects, they become part of a new digital workforce."
A workforce has a manager, and before the pilot becomes production that manager must answer for the agent, with a defined budget and an ROI target to hit. Without that, nobody can say whether this workforce pays for itself.
Sources: Security Leaders · IPNews