Gartner just lately revealed a brand new report the place it predicted that by the tip of 2027, over 40% of agentic AI initiatives can be canceled. Elements contributing to this decline embrace escalating prices, unclear enterprise worth, and insufficient threat controls.
In accordance with the analyst agency, one pattern it’s seeing is that distributors are hyping up AI brokers by “agent washing,” or rebranding current merchandise like AI assistants, RPA, or chatbots with out really including substantial agentic capabilities.
The corporate estimates that of the hundreds of agentic AI distributors on the market, solely about 130 of them are actual and delivering on their guarantees.
“Most agentic AI initiatives proper now are early stage experiments or proof of ideas which are principally pushed by hype and are sometimes misapplied,” mentioned Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at Gartner. “This could blind organizations to the actual price and complexity of deploying AI brokers at scale, stalling initiatives from transferring into manufacturing. They should reduce by means of the hype to make cautious, strategic choices about the place and the way they apply this rising know-how.”
In January, the corporate polled 3,412 webinar attendees to see the place their firm was on their agentic AI journey. The outcomes had been that:
- 19% have made vital investments
- 42% made conservative investments
- 8% made no funding
- 31% had been taking a “wait and see” method or had been uncertain.
Regardless of its prediction that many present AI agent initiatives can be canceled over the course of the following a number of years, Gartner does nonetheless imagine there’s alternative. Agentic AI does have the potential to reinforce useful resource effectivity, automate advanced duties, and introduce new enterprise improvements.
It predicts that by 2028, 15% of day-to-day work choices can be made autonomously and 33% of enterprise software program functions will embrace agentic AI.
Throughout this era the place the know-how remains to be younger, Gartner recommends solely pursuing agentic AI in circumstances the place it delivers clear worth or ROI.
It additionally recommends rethinking workflows from the bottom up reasonably than attempting to include agentic AI into legacy programs, which generally is a technically advanced and costly course of.
“To get actual worth from agentic AI, organizations should deal with enterprise productiveness, reasonably than simply particular person activity augmentation,” mentioned Verma. “They will begin by utilizing AI brokers when choices are wanted, automation for routine workflows and assistants for easy retrieval. It’s about driving enterprise worth by means of price, high quality, velocity and scale.”
