Security, governance, and trust issues are slowing down the adoption of AI agents among organizations, according to a new survey of IT leaders by research and consulting firm Gartner. Despite the growing interest in “agentic AI” or autonomous AI systems, most organizations remain cautious about deploying them fully.
The Gartner survey found that only 15% of IT application leaders are currently considering, piloting, or deploying fully autonomous AI agents, goal-driven tools capable of operating without human oversight. Gartner said concerns about vendor reliability, data security, and hallucination protection are among the top barriers to wider adoption.
“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 of Gartner.
Conducted in May and June 2025, the survey gathered responses from 360 IT application leaders from organizations with at least 250 full-time employees across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. The goal was to assess how generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI are being used in enterprise applications.
The study found that 75% of respondents are piloting, deploying, or have already deployed some form of AI agent. However, Goss said that “concerns around governance, maturity, and agent sprawl continue to hamper the deployment of truly agentic AI.”
Only 19% of IT leaders said they have high or complete trust in their vendors’ ability to prevent hallucinations, or inaccurate outputs generated by AI systems. About 74% believe that AI agents represent a new attack vector into their organizations, and just 13% strongly agreed that they have the right governance frameworks to manage these tools.
When asked about the potential productivity gains from AI agents, 26% of respondents said they expect a transformative impact, 53% expect a significant but not transformative one, and 20% believe the impact will be marginal.
Gartner also highlighted that alignment between IT, business units, and executives is essential for successful AI implementation. Only 14% of respondents said their organizations have strong alignment on what problems AI should address. According to Gartner, companies with strong alignment are 1.6 times more likely to view AI agents as transformative and more than three times more likely to find significant value from GenAI tools.
“Alignment between IT, the business and executive leadership over what problems AI can solve and how to measure its value are critical for successful AI deployments, but we see that many organizations do not have this,” said Goss.
Organizations with weaker alignment often deploy AI agents for office productivity tasks, while those with stronger alignment focus on more targeted applications such as customer service, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and sales.
“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,” Goss said.
Across all respondents, 64% said analytics and business intelligence are the areas where AI agents will have the greatest impact, followed by customer service (55%) and office productivity (39%).
Although interest is growing, most leaders do not expect AI agents to replace applications or workers in the near term. Only 12% strongly agreed that AI agents would replace applications in the next two to four years, while just 7% said the same about workers.
“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.
To prepare for AI agents, Gartner recommends that organizations focus on three priorities: building governance frameworks to prevent sprawl, aligning business goals with high-impact use cases, and adopting a multivendor strategy to ensure flexibility and reduce risks.