The past year generated major hype about AI agents, with tons of experimentation and lots of failure, and some AI experts see only limited improvements in 2026. Research firm Gartner, for example, has predicted that 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027, because of escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls. Meanwhile, data about how many enterprises have actually deployed agents successfully is conflicting. A May survey by PwC found that 79% of companies represented had adopted agents in some capacity. But enterprise search vendors Lucidworks, which developed an agent to assess the AI capabilities of ecommerce sites, found that only 6% of the 1,100 sites it analyzed had deployed more than one agentic solution.

Full report : CIOs still have issues to overcome in their approach to AI agents, including trust concerns and not enough focus on outcomes.