Enterprises winning with AI agents are limiting how much the agents can do alone

Enterprise AI teams are finding that highly autonomous agents often struggle in real deployments because of rising costs, unclear ROI, and weak oversight. Gartner predicts more than 40% of current agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2028, while McKinsey says governance maturity remains low across most organizations.

The market is shifting from a race to maximize agent autonomy toward a race to make agents trustworthy enough for legal, risk, and compliance approval. Companies that define narrow responsibilities, enforce controls, and build mature AI governance may gain an advantage over those chasing unconstrained automation.