A new report from Gartner has stated that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to growing costs, elusive business value and insufficient security. The survey conducted in January 2025 polled 3,412 webinar attendees.
The study also revealed that 19% of the organizations had made significant investments in agentic AI, 42% had made conservative investments, 8% had no investments, while the remaining 31% were taking a wait and see approach or were on the fence.
“Most agentic AI projects right now are early-stage experiments or proofs of concept that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied,” said Anushree Verma, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner. “This can blind organizations to the real cost and complexity of deploying AI agents at scale, stalling projects from moving into production. They need to cut through the hype to make careful, strategic decisions about where and how they apply this emerging technology.”
Most vendors were party to what the report called “agent washing,” which was to market their existing products like AI assistants or robotic process automation (RPA) tools and chatbots as AI agents. The report estimated that around 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors were of substance.
However, agentic AI still offers a large scope in advancement of AI capabilities and market opportunity.
The report said that despite the initial hurdles, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028, up from 0% in 2024. Additionally, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, up from less than 1% in 2024.
