Gartner: over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by end of 2027 — never for a technology failure

Gartner projects that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be scrapped by the end of 2027. The three causes it names are not technical — escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls. What kills an AI project, then, is not the model but the absence of a quantified use case and guardrails: launched on hype, with no measurable value from the outset, it is already among the 40%.

For a small or mid-sized company, the rule is simple: before any deployment, set a single defensible value metric, measured before and after, and make scaling contingent on its verified improvement rather than on the number of tools installed.

Source: Gartner, “Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027,” June 25, 2025.