Agentic AI: Is the Potential Real?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Artificial Intelligence  

Agentic AI has become a hot new topic, and it’s starting to see a lot of organizational investments as well with different software vendors launching their offerings. The portfolio and project management space is no different.

For those of you not familiar, agentic AI is the use of AI to actually do things instead of just provide information. AI agents can be deployed to build schedules, allocate resources, develop risk lists, and so on. And they can work together to build fairly complex workflows. Of course, people retain the ability to control and limit exactly what AI agents can do, but the potential to drive effectiveness and efficiency is generating a lot of excitement.

But now, Gartner has stepped in and poured a rather large bucket of cold water on things. Specifically, with a prediction suggesting that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. That’s a heck of a lot, and you know from experience that not every project that should be canceled is canceled. So, the implications are that an even higher percentage are going to struggle to the point where they are no longer viable, or to where investments would be better off diverted elsewhere.

The story doesn’t get any better when you drill into the details a bit more. The projects will, according to Gartner, be canceled due to “escalating costs, unclear …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.