STAMFORD, Conn., October 1, 2025 — Only 15% of IT application leaders said they are currently considering, piloting, or deploying fully autonomous AI agents (goal driven AI tools that do not require human oversight), according to a survey by Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.
In May and June 2025, Gartner conducted an industry-wide survey of 360 IT application leaders from organizations with at least 250 full-time employees in North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific, with the aim of understanding the impact of generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI across enterprise applications.
“The hype around agentic AI continues to grow, with vendors positioning AI agents as the next phase of AI evolution that will address the shortfalls of more traditional GenAI assistants,” said Max Goss, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner. “Seventy-five percent of survey respondents said they were piloting, were deploying or had already deployed some form of AI agents into their organization; however, concerns around governance, maturity and agent sprawl continue to hamper the deployment of truly agentic AI.”
The barriers to deploying fully autonomous solutions are a lack of trust in the vendors to provide suitable security, governance and hallucination protection coupled with concerns over organizational readiness. Only 19% of respondents had high or complete trust in their vendor’s abilities to provide adequate hallucination protection. Meanwhile, 74% believe that AI agents represent a new attack vector into their organization and only 13% strongly agreed that they had the right governance structures in place to manage them.
AI Agent Impact Is Significant but Perhaps Not Transformative
Twenty-six percent of respondents felt that agents will have a transformative impact on productivity. Most (53%) felt their impact would be significant, but may not be transformative, and 20% felt they would provide marginal gains (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Expectation of AI Agents on Productivity
Source: Gartner (September 2025)
The survey showed that only 14% of respondents strongly agreed that they have alignment between IT, business users and leadership over what problems AI will solve. Those that do are 1.6 times more likely to say that AI agents will be transformative, and over three times more likely to find significant value from their GenAI tools.
“Alignment between IT, the business and executive leadership over what problems AI can solve and how to measure its value are critical for successful AI deployments, but we see that many organizations do not have this,” said Goss.
Organizations May Be Focusing AI Agent Deployments in the Wrong Places
Organizations that do not have a common understanding over what business problems AI can solve are nearly two times more likely to list office productivity as a domain where AI agents will have the most impact. Those that have stronger alignment tend to focus on more vertical use cases like customer service, ERP, sales, among others.
“Office productivity and the digital workplace are the default for those organizations that don’t have a strong grasp on what they are doing with agents, but they are not necessarily the areas that will provide organizations with the most value,” said Goss. “Among all survey respondents, analytics and business intelligence topped the list, with 64% ranking it among the top three domains that will be most impacted by AI agents, followed by customer service (55%) and office productivity (39%).”
AI Agents Are Unlikely to Replace Applications and Workers, at Least Not Yet
Although the long-term implementation of AI agents is less clear, most leaders do not expect them to replace applications or workers within the next two to four years; only 12% strongly agreed AI agents would replace applications, and just 7% strongly agreed they would replace workers in that timeframe.
The percentages are much higher among those who somewhat agreed with the statement: 34% believe AI agents will replace applications and 29% think they will replace workers within the next two to four years.
“This is still significant for technology that has only been generally available for the last 12 months. It points to both the hype and the fear that exists around AI, specifically agentic AI,” said Goss.
Gartner analysts recommend that organizations focus on three key areas when ramping up to deploy agentic AI:
- AI Agent Governance: Develop a platform-agnostic AI agent governance framework that will reduce the risks of sprawl and will provide clear guidelines, policies and controls to help the organization safely develop its agent capabilities across many different tools and domains.
- Target AI Agents at High-Impact Domains: Establishing alignment between IT and the business over what problems AI agents can solve is critical for success. For example, if deploying agents into office productivity suites presents too much risk and offers too little return, consider other domains that might provide a more tangible ROI, such as customer service, or data and analytics. Targeting AI agents at the right use cases will help to build trust in the technology and show where it can be most impactful.
- Adopt a Multivendor Strategy for AI Agents: Gartner believes it is too early to rely on a single vendor for an AI agent strategy. Organizations should explore options across ERP, CRM and digital workplace portfolios, and leverage vendor capabilities that meet their evolving requirements.
Gartner clients can read more in Assessing the Impact of Generative AI and Agentic AI In Enterprise Applications.
Additional information on the outlook for agentic AI in the enterprise will be presented during Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, the world’s most important conference for CIOs and other IT executives. Gartner analysts and attendees will explore how to become agents of change in their organizations and harness AI for successful digital transformation. Follow news and updates from the conferences on X and LinkedIn using #GartnerSYM, and on the Gartner Newsroom.
Upcoming dates and locations for Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo include:
October 20-23, 2025 | Orlando, FL
October 28-30, 2025 | Yokohama, Japan
November 10-13, 2025 | Barcelona, Spain
November 17-19, 2025 | Kochi, India
About Gartner AI Use Case Insights
Gartner AI Use Case Insights is an interactive tool that helps technology and business leaders efficiently discover, evaluate, and prioritize AI use cases to potentially pursue. Clients can search over 500 use cases (applications of AI in specific industries) and over 380 case studies (real world examples) based on industry, business function, and Gartner’s assessment of potential business value. Clients can access the interactive tool at https://tools.gartner.com/use-case-insights.
About Gartner for Information Technology Executives
Gartner for Information Technology Executives provides actionable, objective insight to CIOs and IT leaders to help them drive their organizations through digital transformation and lead business growth. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/en/information-technology.
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About Gartner
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