Atolio has been selected as one of Canada's Top 100 AI Startups for 2026 by ALL IN, Canada's largest AI and technology event. More than 330 companies applied this year; Atolio is one of the 100 that made the list. The cohort showcases at the Startup Zone on September 16 and 17 in Montreal, in front of roughly 7,500 attendees from more than 40 countries.
Here's why this matters for the future of AI enterprise search and agentic governance.
The agent problem is getting bigger every quarter
Gartner projects the average global Fortune 500 enterprise will run more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, up from fewer than 15 in 2025 (Gartner, 2026). Only 13% of organizations believe they have the right governance in place for that growth. That’s in part because most of those agents will inherit whatever access and retrieval controls their enterprise already has in place. Which, for most companies, means inheriting the same permission gaps and security blind spots that have made enterprise search hard to trust for years.
If you’re a CISO or CTO in a regulated industry, this isn’t news to you. Every agent added without a permission-aware knowledge layer underneath it is one more way for the wrong person – or, in 2026, the wrong model – to end up with the wrong data.
What actually needs to be true underneath your agents
A knowledge layer that lives inside the same security boundary as the data it indexes enforces permissions instead of assuming them – the difference between an agent that respects who's allowed to see what, and one that doesn't. That means a single index across every system a company runs, with both the knowledge and governance layers inside the customer's own perimeter.
This recognition is a small, external signal. And one the broader AI ecosystem is taking seriously now too (looking at you, Hugging Face breach). While the vulnerability behind the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident was patched, the pattern underneath it matters: an agent that inherits standing access can move through a system as fast as the credentials it finds. For anyone building an agent strategy right now, it's worth treating as a checklist item rather than a nice-to-have: whatever platform sits underneath those agents needs to answer the “does it respect our permissions” question architecturally, not with a policy document.
Worth a stop in Montreal?
The Startup Zone runs September 16-17, 2026. If you're curious how permission-aware search actually holds up in practice, this is the place to see it. Or, you can schedule a time to talk with us here. Even if you just have questions about how this knowledge layer works, we’d love to chat with you!