Some 40 percent of AI agent projects are likely to be cancelled within only two years due to rising costs and a poor return on investment, research firm Gartner predicted, saying the use cases for agentic AI is currently immature.

Much agentic AI is driven by hype, with the vast majority of so-called AI agents actually being repackaged versions of existing products such as chatbots, the analysts said.

Senior director analyst Anushree Verma said most current AI agent projects are early-stage experiments or proofs-of-concept that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied.

Cost and complexity

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

Gartner said a poll earlier this year found 19 percent of organisations had made significant investments in AI agents, with another 42 percent making conservative investments. Another 8 percent had made none.

Nearly one-third, or 31 percent of respondents to that survey said they were holding back and waiting to see how the technology developed.

“Most agentic AI propositions lack significant value or return on investment, as current models don’t have the maturity and agency to autonomously achieve complex business goals or follow nuanced instructions over time,” said Verma.

She added that many uses cases currently positioned as agentic do not actually require agentic AI implementations.

The study found that many of what are being marketed as AI agents are actually repackaged versions of existing tools such as chatbots, AI assistants and robotic process automation (RPA) tools.

Only 130 of the thousands of tools being marketed as AI agents actually have agentic capabilities, meaning they can take autonomous action, Gartner said.

‘Agent-washing’

The firm described the trend as “agent-washing”, similar to the way many pre-existing products have been rebranded as “AI-powered” in recent years amidst hype around ChatGPT and similar offerings.

However, the firm said AI agents can offer real value and predicted they would gain ground within organisations.

At least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions could be made autonomously through AI agents by 2028, up from 0 percent last year, Gartner said.

And some 33 percent of enterprise software applications could include agentic AI by that time, up from less than 1 percent last year.