AI Agent Sprawl: AvePoint’s 88% Incident Rate and Akamai’s $600M Robotics Cloud Deal

For AI practitioners, the two earnings stories are a microcosm of the industry’s most urgent problems. AvePoint’s CEO Tianyi Jiang defined a new term—AI-agent sprawl—and backed it with data: 88% of IT leaders in a 750-respondent survey had a security incident tied to AI agents, and one in five organizations didn’t even know if their people were building agents using unsanctioned tools. This reveals a governance void that AvePoint’s AgentPulse aims to fill. On the other end, Akamai’s blockbuster $600 million commitment from a robotics company shows that serious AI workloads are moving to specialized cloud providers, not just hyperscalers. The deal, which brings Akamai’s 2026 multi-year cloud commitments to $2.8 billion, highlights that AI’s compute appetite is insatiable. Together, these earnings underscore a paradox: AI is being deployed faster than organizations can secure it, and that gap is a commercial opportunity.

The second-quarter 2026 earnings from Akamai Technologies and AvePoint unveiled a technology sector increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence—one where AI is simultaneously the engine of growth and the source of new risks. Akamai, a legacy content delivery network now pivoting to cloud infrastructure and security, reported revenue of $1.1 billion, up 5% year over year. The standout was a four-year commitment exceeding $600 million from a U.S.-based robotics company, which propelled Akamai’s total 2026 signed multi-year cloud infrastructure commitments past $2.8 billion. Chief Executive Tom Leighton said the robotics customer would not materially contribute until 2027, signaling that while the pipeline is swelling, near-term revenue recognition is muted. Meanwhile, capital expenditures of $347 million—32% of revenue—underscored heavy investment in GPU capacity to support AI workloads; management said all available GPU capacity is sold out, and another $500 million will be deployed to replenish and expand inventory, with $60 million in 2026 and the remainder in early 2027.

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Revenue climbed 22% to $124.5 million, driven by a 27% jump in SaaS revenue to $98.5 million, which now contributes 79% of the total.

AvePoint, a governance, security, and recovery platform, told a different but similarly AI-centric story. Revenue climbed 22% to $124.5 million, driven by a 27% jump in SaaS revenue to $98.5 million, which now contributes 79% of the total. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached $465.1 million, up 27% (24% constant currency), with record net new ARR of $29.9 million. CEO Tianyi Jiang focused squarely on AI-agent sprawl—autonomous agents proliferating across Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and custom environments. He cited an AvePoint survey of 750 global IT leaders revealing that 88% experienced at least one AI-agent-related security incident in the prior year, and nearly 20% were unaware whether employees were using unsanctioned tools to build AI agents. Jiang positioned AvePoint’s Confidence Platform and the newly launched AgentPulse as a governance layer for enterprise AI, making trust “the essential unifying layer.”