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ActiveState study finds AI remediation costs span budgets

Source Decision Insights Record Published October 20, 2026 Companies 1
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1st article in the last 90 days, one of 3 articles referencing ActiveState. Previous coverage: ActiveState appoints Abby Kearns as CEO (Mar 2026).

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Seniority
Director
Job function
Cybersecurity / Information Security
Persona
Security Operations Leader
Buyer role
Decision Maker / Budget Holder
Decision stage
How to start
Adoption curve
Early Majority
Technology maturity
Operational Expansion
Industry
Information Technology / Cybersecurity / Application, Cloud & AI Security / Application Security & DevSecOps (SAST/DAST/SCA/Supply Chain)

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ActiveState has released The AI Remediation Bill, a study of 307 security, governance, platform, and engineering leaders in North America and Western Europe that Moving Horizon conducted for the company. The findings indicate that the cost of AI-assisted development is spread across engineering, operations, compliance, and security, with each team paying from its own budget.

AI-assisted development is delivering gains, with 93% of respondents reporting higher engineering productivity. Engineers nonetheless spend at least 139 hours a year, more than 17 working days, fixing or revisiting AI-assisted work. For an organization with 100 engineers, that totals at least 13,900 hours annually, roughly the working capacity of seven full-time employees. Meanwhile, 83% of respondents say developer productivity is outpacing governance capabilities, while 71% believe their current approach can scale.

Governance activity mostly occurs after components arrive in development. Of respondents, 94% say AI has increased open source consumption, while 63% address open source vulnerabilities only after scanners or security tools identify them. Half say new dependencies can reach production without prior review or approval. Respondents currently devote 26% of open source governance effort to prevention before deployment and say that share should be 37%.

In operations, 76% had a software release delayed by unmanaged open source dependencies in the past year. In compliance, 58% received a compliance or audit finding related to open source governance. In security, 32% confirmed an incident traceable to an unmanaged dependency over the past two years. Only 31% of organizations have formally quantified the total cost of unmanaged open source risk, while 47% have only an informal estimate.

Abby Kearns, CEO of ActiveState, said “AI is becoming a permanent part of how software gets built.” She said engineering’s share is only part of the total, since security, compliance, and operations pay the rest from their own budgets. She said “The way to keep the gains is to govern open source as it enters the codebase.”

Jim Mercer, Program Vice President, Software Development, DevOps, and DevSecOps at IDC, said “Being able to control what enters the pipeline is key to enabling organizations to scale AI-assisted development.” The report also outlines a five-step path that starts with quantifying costs across teams.

Press release, provided by Cision on behalf of ActiveState. Read the original.

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