DNSFilter, a global leader in AI-powered protective DNS and content filtering, today released findings from its 2026 Visibility Deficit cybersecurity survey, revealing a widening gap between how confident executives feel about their organization’s AI and cybersecurity posture and what their own IT teams are actually experiencing. The study found that this disconnect runs through executive confidence, security budgets, and how well AI tools are governed.

“Organizations aren’t overconfident so much as disconnected. Executives and practitioners are looking at two different pictures of reality – the people closest to the systems see incidents going unreported and downplayed, while the people signing the budgets don’t. Money is flowing to AI governance, but it’s aimed at the wrong picture. That disconnect is exactly where AI-driven threats are finding room to operate,” said Ken Carnesi, CEO, DNSFilter.

The visibility gap is starkest around business continuity where nearly three-quarters of executives (73.9%) believe they’d maintain critical operations through a 72-hour cyberattack, compared with just 47.5% of IT management and 50% of cybersecurity professionals running those systems day to day. Nearly half of IT management (45.8%) say their organization has had unreported security incidents, versus only 17.4% of executives who believe that’s the case. While 52% of IT management say incidents have been downplayed due to limited detection capability, 39.1% of executives admit to the same.

The gap extends to the AI arms race itself. Between 69% and 71% of IT management and network and cloud professionals say attackers are adopting AI faster than their own teams can keep pace, compared with just 43% of executive leaders: more than a quarter of whom (26%) believe their own team is actually ahead. Executives also stay focused on the models they recognize by name, with 65% flagging ChatGPT as a top risk, while practitioners track a far wider, harder-to-govern surface that includes DeepSeek, Kimi K2, and Mistral.

This perception gap is showing up in how spending decisions are made, too. While 74.5% of respondents say that budgets increased over the past year, executives and practitioners are directing that money at different problems. Executives prioritize AI security governance (52.2%) and network security (26.1%), while practitioners want more investment in endpoint detection (22.8%), security training (19.3%), and incident response (18.4%). AI governance is simultaneously flagged as the largest security gap (36.25%) and the top investment priority (40.25%), showcasing that the money is going to the right category, but the gap is persisting anyway.

“More budget and ‘good enough’ policies haven’t closed the gap on their own,” said Kasey Best, Senior Director, Threat Hunting, DNSFilter. “Some of the most mature, best-resourced organizations we surveyed also report the highest rate of shadow AI incidents. Governance maturity and actual safety are turning out to be two different things that organizations are not currently equipping their teams to handle.”

Scale introduces its own exposure: the largest organizations run six to ten AI tools at nearly double the overall rate of their smaller peers (47.5% vs. 25.2%) and report the highest shadow AI incident rate of any size band, at 32.5% versus 20.1% overall. Shadow AI is already producing measurable damage with 40% of organizations citing an incident tied to a third-party SaaS or AI tool in the past year, and 20% confirmed an unauthorized AI connection directly caused one. More than a third of organizations (36.8%) notify IT of new AI connections only after access has already been granted, and 6.5% send no notification at all. Executives sense the blind spot even if they can’t quantify it: 21.7% suspect unauthorized AI connections have occurred but can’t confirm it, more than any other role surveyed.

Additional key findings from the survey include:

  • 8.7% of executives see no emerging AI risk at all, more than double the overall rate of other surveyed groups 3.8%

  • Finance and Healthcare respondents flag AI models such as Kimi K2 and Mistral at roughly double the rate of IT & Telecoms respondents, a pattern that can be linked to data-sovereignty and compliance concerns

  • 73.9% of executives believe new AI tools require admin approval before access is granted, versus 58–60% of practitioners who say the same

  • Only 49% of organizations have formal, consistently enforced policies governing autonomous AI agents

The DNSFilter AI Cybersecurity Survey 2026 was conducted among 400 IT and cybersecurity professionals at the manager level and above, at companies with 150 to 5,000 employees, across North America, in June 2026. Read the full report and findings here: https://explore.dnsfilter.com/2026-ai-cybersecurity-report

If you would like support or assistance about how to address your Shadow AI or AI governance challenges, simply contact one of our many specialists who will be happy to discuss this matter further with you, click here.

About DNSFilter

DNSFilter is a cybersecurity company that protects every click, leveraging AI-driven content filtering and threat protection to block threats up to 10 days earlier than competitors. DNSFilter’s solution secures workers wherever they are, helping organizations boost productivity, minimize compliance risk, and protect corporate brands on public Wi-Fi networks. Trusted by more than 45,000 organizations worldwide, DNSFilter enables organizations to deploy powerful protection in minutes while gaining deep visibility into their security posture. Learn more at dnsfilter.com

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