Agentic AI is coming and most companies are not ready - thestreet.com

Gartner says 40 percent of enterprise applications will feature AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5 percent today. The same analyst firm also says more than 40 percent of those same agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027. Both things are true simultaneously, and that is the entire story.

Enterprise wants agentic AI badly. The numbers are unambiguous: 85 percent of companies want to become agentic within three years, according to the Celonis 2026 Process Optimization Report (note: the VentureBeat article citing this data was presented by Celonis, which sells process intelligence, making the readiness-gap finding also a sales pitch for its own product category). AI agent usage among Global 2000 companies is expected to increase tenfold by 2027, with API call loads rising a thousandfold, according to Joget analyst data. Eighty-two percent of decision-makers tell VentureBeat that AI will fail to deliver return on investment if it does not understand how the business actually runs (disclosure: VentureBeat was presented by Celonis).

The problem is that 76 percent of those same enterprises admit their operations cannot support what they are trying to build (Celonis 2026 Process Optimization Report; VentureBeat was presented by Celonis).

This is not a technology gap. The models are good enough. The agent frameworks exist. What does not exist is the process layer — the organizational infrastructure that tells an AI agent what the business actually means.

The Process Layer Problem

The phrase process layer has been making rounds in enterprise AI circles for the past year, and it describes something unglamorous but essential: the structured representation of how a company actually operates. Business logic, decision trees, approval chains, exception handlers, the things nobody has ever written down but everyone knows are there.

Without it, an agent can optimize a workflow it does not understand. With it, the agent can reason about whether the workflow is correct in the first place.

Roborhythms puts a number on the deployment gap that makes the process layer problem concrete: only 6 percent of organizations have what could be called fully deployed agentic AI workflows. The other 66 percent are on their second or third pilot. Not because the technology failed — because the organization was not ready to receive what the technology was offering.

The other 66 percent are on their second or third pilot, Roborhythms noted, characterizing what those numbers mean in practice. A proof of concept was not shut down.

That is a brutal definition of progress.

The Rush to Deploy

The pressure to deploy is real and not entirely irrational. Gartner has warned that C-suite executives at software organizations have a three- to six-month window to define their agentic AI product strategy or risk falling behind peers. The window is genuinely short. The competitive dynamics are not imagined.

But the pressure to deploy before the plumbing is ready is also the primary driver of the failure rate Gartner is predicting. Deploy an agent into a process nobody has mapped, give it access credentials it should not have, and let it run — that is the architecture for both rapid deployment and rapid cancellation.

Paul Roetzer, founder of the Marketing AI Institute, has called the widely cited 95 percent of GenAI pilots fail statistic into question. The finding, originally from MIT is Neil C. Thompson and colleagues, is based on 52 interviews using a narrow six-month P&L return-on-investment definition — what Roetzer calls not a viable statistically valid thing. The number travels well; the methodology does not. Editors note: treat the 95 percent figure as directional signal, not rigorous measurement.

That said, the directional signal is not wrong. Ninety-five percent of enterprise GenAI pilots failing to achieve rapid revenue acceleration, as reported by Fortune citing the MIT work, is consistent with what practitioners describe anecdotally. The MIT number may be too precise; the shape of the claim is accurate.

What the Infrastructure Actually Requires

The agentic stack has moved fast. LangChain and similar orchestration frameworks have made it straightforward to wire together a multi-agent system — language model, tools, memory, routing. A solo developer can build a functional agent in an afternoon. The primitives exist and they work.

Enterprise deployment requires something the primitives do not provide: process documentation that is precise enough for a machine to act on, and governance that is robust enough to survive a machine acting incorrectly.

The latter is the harder problem. Agents fail in ways that are legible but fast. A human who makes a bad decision can be asked to explain it. An agent that makes a bad decision at 3 a.m. across seventeen downstream systems has already done the damage before anyone sees the log.

This is why FedRAMP authorization, SOC 2 compliance, and auditability are not checkbox items for enterprise agentic deployments — they are the price of entry. The organizations that have actually shipped agentic workflows at scale are the ones that built the compliance and documentation infrastructure first, then deployed the agent into a process that was already mapped, versioned, and approved.

Everyone else is still on pilot three.

What to Watch

The process-layer infrastructure market is nascent. A handful of startups — Workgrid, IBM Watsonx Orchestrate, ServiceNow AI Gateway — are building in this space, along with a wave of smaller entrants. Whether the market develops as a standalone category or gets absorbed into existing workflow automation vendors is an open question.

The Gartner contradiction — deployment at scale alongside high cancellation rates — is likely to persist through 2027. The enterprises that avoid becoming a cancellation statistic will be the ones that recognized that deploying an agent and deploying an agent into a process that can absorb it are different projects entirely.

The three- to six-month window Gartner identifies is not a deadline for deploying agents. It is a deadline for building the process layer that makes deployment survivable.

Primary sources: Gartner (40 percent enterprise agentic apps by 2026), Gartner (40 percent project cancellation by 2027), VentureBeat (85 percent enterprise ambition, 76 percent ops gap), VentureBeat (82 percent ROI dependency on process understanding), Joget (tenfold agent usage growth, thousandfold API call growth by 2027), Roborhythms (6 percent full deployment, 66 percent on pilot two or three), Fortune citing MIT NANDA (95 percent pilot failure rate), Marketing AI Institute (52-interview methodological critique of the MIT finding)