Don’t Mistake Rebranded Chatbots for True Agentic AI, Gartner Warns

Major companies, including Walmart and PepsiCo, are preparing for a future when generative AI will be able to perform tasks without human intervention, including serving as a personal shopper. 

However, a report from Gartner warns companies to carefully consider the ROI of pursuing the technology to avoid disrupting workflows and being taken in by solution providers who are just rebranding chatbots and AI assistants rather than actually offering new autonomous capabilities. 

While there are thousands of vendors purporting to sell agentic AI, Gartner believes only about 130 are actually offering the technology. It warns these rebrands are merely a type of "agent washing." 

“To get real value from agentic AI, organizations must focus on enterprise productivity, rather than just individual task augmentation,” Gartner senior director analyst Anushree Verma said in a statement. “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.”

Also: Walmart is applying agentic AI to optimize in-store marketing operations

By 2028, agentic AI will be incorporated in 33% of enterprise software applications and will be able to automate at least 15% of the decisions made in a typical workday, according to Gartner. However, the company expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects currently in the works to be cancelled in the next two years as they prove to be too risky and expensive.

“Most agentic AI projects right now are early-stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied,” said Verma. “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.”