Gartner lately revealed a brand new report the place it predicted that by the tip of 2027, over 40% of agentic AI initiatives might be canceled. Elements contributing to this decline embody escalating prices, unclear enterprise worth, and insufficient danger controls.
In response to the analyst agency, one pattern it’s seeing is that distributors are hyping up AI brokers by “agent washing,” or rebranding present merchandise like AI assistants, RPA, or chatbots with out truly 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 might be largely pushed by hype and are sometimes misapplied,” mentioned Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at Gartner. “This may blind organizations to the true value and complexity of deploying AI brokers at scale, stalling initiatives from transferring into manufacturing. They should lower via the hype to make cautious, strategic choices about the place and the way they apply this rising expertise.”
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 might be canceled over the course of the following a number of years, Gartner does nonetheless consider 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 might be made autonomously and 33% of enterprise software program purposes will embody agentic AI.
Throughout this era the place the expertise continues to be younger, Gartner recommends solely pursuing agentic AI in instances the place it delivers clear worth or ROI.
It additionally recommends rethinking workflows from the bottom up slightly than making an attempt to include agentic AI into legacy techniques, which is usually a technically advanced and costly course of.
“To get actual worth from agentic AI, organizations should concentrate on enterprise productiveness, slightly than simply particular person process augmentation,” mentioned Verma. “They’ll begin through the use of AI brokers when choices are wanted, automation for routine workflows and assistants for easy retrieval. It’s about driving enterprise worth via value, high quality, velocity and scale.”
