Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Expected to Fail by 2027, Report Finds
A January 2025 Gartner poll of more than 3,400 webinar attendees found that only 19% of organizations reported significant investment in agentic AI.
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[Image source: Krishna Prasad/MITSMR Middle East]
As organizations race to explore the potential of agentic AI—systems designed to act with autonomy toward specific goals—many are likely to face setbacks. According to research firm Gartner, over 40% of agentic AI projects will be abandoned by the end of 2027, largely due to soaring costs, limited clarity around business impact, and insufficient risk management frameworks.
“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 at 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.”
A January 2025 Gartner poll of more than 3,400 webinar attendees found that only 19% of organizations reported significant investment in agentic AI. 42% said they had made conservative investments, while 8% had made none. The remaining 31% were either undecided or still evaluating their approach.
Gartner also cautions against what it calls “agent washing”—the rebranding of existing technologies such as chatbots and RPA systems as agentic AI, despite lacking the autonomy and complexity required of true agentic systems. The firm estimates that only around 130 of the thousands of vendors in the space offer genuine agentic capabilities.
“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,” Verma added. “Many use cases positioned as agentic today don’t require agentic implementations.”
Still, Gartner remains optimistic about the long-term prospects. The firm predicts that by 2028, agentic AI will autonomously make at least 15% of routine business decisions, and a third of enterprise applications will incorporate agentic features—up from less than 1% in 2024.
“To get real value from agentic AI, organizations must focus on enterprise productivity, rather than just individual task augmentation,” Verma said. “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.”
As the field matures, Gartner advises organizations to invest only where clear ROI exists, and to consider reimagining workflows from the ground up rather than force-fitting agents into outdated systems.
