India, Oct. 21 -- New Relic has released its 2026 Observability Forecast for Financial Services, highlighting a gap between AI adoption and monitoring across the industry. The report draws on responses from 278 financial services IT and engineering leaders and practitioners, as part of a global study of 2,575 respondents.

The report finds that 22% of financial services companies have deployed AI agents in production without monitoring them. This leaves nearly one in five companies with live agents without visibility into their actions, raising concerns around reliability, security and compliance.

New Relic calls the resulting problem "phantom velocity": productivity gains from AI that are offset by downtime and emergency fixes caused by...