16 hours Ago By Lindsay Clark
Among the optimism and opportunities perceived around AI agents, Gartner has spotted some risks – namely that organizations might create "thousands of bots, but nobody now remembers what those bots do or why they were built." The collision of muddied management thinking and much-hyped autonomous agents will be interesting to watch play out. In Gartner's view, "agentic AI" is about "goal-driven software entities that have been granted rights by the organization to act on its behalf to autonomously make decisions and take action.
" They differ from robotic process automation, which stitches together enterprise applications with trained bots, as agents do not need explicit inputs and their outputs are not predetermined. The analyst company notes that AI agents have become the flavor of the month with vendors. Notable examples include Salesforce, with the vendor's ebullient CEO, Marc Benioff, boasting to investors that by releasing a billion agents by 2026, Salesforce could capture a "very high margin opportunity.
" In its latest paper (available only to clients, although there is an upcoming open to all webinar ), Gartner weighs up the pros and cons. Perhaps it's wisest to start with the bad news. "The danger exists of repeating the robotic process automation problem: organizations created thousands of bots, but nobody now remembers what those bots do or why they were built," it says.
In addition, organizations might also build and deploy their own low-code agentic AI inside the IT stack, "which may not meet your security or quality standards." "Agentic AI will make decisions based on its analysis of your organization's data, making plans based on that analysis. From there, it'll act on those plans.
This will be dangerous unless you invest in the skills, practices and technologies to deliver trustworthy AI agents. Your organization's data may be of poor quality, further increasing the risk. As well as creating risk, poor data quality and architecture will also inhibit agentic AI's development.
" Gartner also warned that AI agents could alienate customers if the experience is poorly designed. Gartner says organizations should create "customer journey maps to design the ideal customer experience and define guardrails before handing over to AI agents for execution." Whether it's a good idea or not, agentic AI is coming, Gartner says.
It forecasts that a third of enterprise software will incorporate such agents while 20 percent of digital storefront interactions will be conducted by AI agents. "Agentic AI will be incorporated into AI assistants and built into software, SaaS platforms, Internet-of-Things devices and robotics," Gartner said. "When AI assistants start planning, making decisions, and taking action for you, agentic AI will be there.
It'll be everywhere, with the potential to extend collaborative work management platforms beyond task tracking into planning and executing tasks." The benefit for organizations might be that – if employed properly – AI agents can "increase the number of tasks and workflows that can be automated." "The potential that agentic AI has to constantly analyze the performance of personalized interactions surpasses human capabilities, ensuring more precise and effective customer engagement.
Software developers are likely to be some of the first affected, as existing AI coding assistants gain maturity and AI agents provide the next set of incremental benefits," said the research paper, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025: Agentic AI. Of course, risks can be managed for a reasonable cost if the potential benefits outweigh them. At this stage, though, we must ask ourselves whether any government or corporate IT department has ever been known to skimp on the hard part.
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