Gartner: Almost half of agentic AI projects flop
Nearly half of agentic AI projects (40%) will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk management controls, according to a global report by research firm Gartner.
According to a poll of 3,412 webinar attendees, 19% said their organisation had made significant investments in agentic AI, 42% had made conservative investments, 8% no investments, with the remaining 31% taking a wait and see approach or are unsure.
To further dampen the enthusiasm in the tech market surrounding this topic, analyst Anushree Verma said: “Most agentic AI projects are currently early experiments, driven by hype and often misapplied. Organisations are blinded by the possibilities without seeing the real costs and complexity.”
AI agents use a language model connected to various services and applications to automate tasks or business processes. A simple example in an online shop: having the chatbot call the logistics system in the background for the shipping status of a package and then responding to the consumer in natural language.
Gartner predicted at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028, up from 0% in 2024. In addition, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, up from less than 1% in 2024.
Gartner noted a worrying trend of ‘agent washing’, where vendors relabel existing products without substantial agentic capabilities. It estimated that only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are truly distinctive.
Verma emphasised the importance of a targeted approach: “To create real value, organisations should focus on business productivity rather than clarifying individual tasks. Start with AI agents for decision-making, automation for routine workflows, and assistants for simple information retrieval.”
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