AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Feature IT consultancy Gartner predicts that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls.

That implies something like 60 percent of agentic AI projects would be retained, which is actually remarkable given that the rate of successful task completion for AI agents, as measured by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and at Salesforce, is only about 30 to 35 percent for multi-step tasks.

To further muddy the math, Gartner contends that most of the purported agentic AI vendors offer products or services that don't actually qualify as agentic AI.

AI agents use a machine learning model that's been connected to various services and applications to automate tasks or business processes. Think of them as AI models in an iterative loop trying to respond to input using applications and ...