Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027 end, says Gartner

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More than 40 percent of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls, research and advisory firm Gartner Inc has said.

Organisations need to cut through the hype to make careful, strategic decisions about where and how they apply this emerging technology, the research firm said in a released on June 25.

“Most agentic AI projects right now are early-stage experiments or proofs of concept that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied,” Anushree Verma, senior director analyst, Gartner, said.

This can blind organisations to the real cost and complexity of deploying AI agents at scale, stalling projects from moving into production, she said.

According to a Gartner poll of 3,412 webinar attendees in January, 19 percent said their organisation had made significant investments in agentic AI, 42 percent conservative investments, 8 percent had no investments, and the remaining 31 percent were in a wait-and-watch mode or were unsure.

Many vendors are contributing to the hype by engaging in “agent washing”, the rebranding of existing products such as AI assistants, robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbots, without substantial agentic capabilities.

Gartner estimates that only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.

“Most agentic AI propositions lack significant value or return on investment (ROI), as current models don’t have the maturity and agency to autonomously achieve complex business goals or follow nuanced instructions over time,” said Verma. “Many use cases positioned as agentic today don’t require agentic implementations.”

Business Value

Despite these initial challenges, the trend toward agentic AI represents a leap forward in AI capabilities and market opportunity.

Agentic AI will provide new means to enhance resource efficiency, automate complex tasks and introduce new business innovations, beyond the capabilities of scripted automation bots and virtual assistants.

Gartner predicts that at least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028, up from 0 percent in 2024.

In addition, 33 percent of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, up from less than 1 percent in 2024.

In this early stage, Gartner recommends that agentic AI only be pursued where it delivers clear value or ROI. Integrating agents into legacy systems can be technically complex, often disrupting workflows and requiring costly modifications. In many cases, rethinking workflows with agentic AI from the ground up is the ideal path to successful implementation.