According to Gartner, the technological research and consulting company, over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls.

“Most agentic AI projects right now are early stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied,” explained Anushree Verma, who serves as senior director analyst at Gartner.

“This can blind organisations 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.”

A Gartner poll of over 3,400 people in January 2025 found that 19% said their organisation had made significant investments in agentic AI, 42% has made conservative investments, 8% no investments, with the remaining 31% taking a wait-and-see approach or are unsure.

The research firm noted that 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.

In fact, Gartner estimates that only around 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.”

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Realising Agentic AI’s True Business Value
Despite the challenges, the trend toward agentic AI represents a leap forward in AI capability and market opportunity.

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

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

In this current early stage, the research and consulting firm recommends 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, Gartner noted.

“To get real value from agentic AI, organisations must focus on enterprise productivity, rather than just individual task augmentation,” Verma added.

“They can start by using AI agents when decisions are needed, automation for routine workflows and assistants for simple retrieval. It’s about driving business value through cost, quality, speed and scale.”