Just 15 Percent of IT Leaders Plan on Using Autonomous AI Agents

Only 15% of IT application leaders said they are currently considering, piloting, or deploying fully autonomous AI agents, according to a survey by Gartner. 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 to understand the impact of 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.

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. 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 who 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 is critical for successful AI deployments, but we see that many organizations do not have this,” said Goss. Organizations that do not have a common understanding of 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, and 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%).”

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.