Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Abandoned by 2027 Amid Hype and Poor ROI
A Gartner poll of 3,412 professionals in January 2025 revealed that only 19% had made significant investments in agentic AI.
More than 40% of agentic AI projects will be scrapped by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, vague business value, and insufficient risk management, according to a new report from Gartner, Inc.
A Gartner poll of 3,412 professionals in January 2025 revealed that only 19% had made significant investments in agentic AI, while 42% reported conservative investments.
“Most agentic AI projects right now are early stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied. This can blind organisations to the real cost and complexity of deploying AI agents at scale, stalling projects from moving into production,” Anushree Verma, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, said.
The research firm warned of “agent washing,” where vendors rebrand older technologies like RPA or chatbots as agentic AI.
Verma noted, “Most agentic AI propositions lack significant value or return on investment (ROI)... Many use cases positioned as agentic today don’t require agentic implementations.”
Despite early setbacks, Gartner sees potential. By 2028, it predicts 15% of daily work decisions and 33% of enterprise software will involve agentic AI.
“To get real value from agentic AI, organizations must focus on enterprise productivity, rather than just individual task augmentation,” Verma added.
Recently, a Salesforce research report revealed that AI agents underperform on basic customer relationship management (CRM) tasks and show poor understanding of confidentiality.
Using a new benchmark called CRMArena-Pro, which uses synthetic data in a Salesforce sandbox, the study found that LLM agents successfully completed only 58% of single-step tasks.
