# Why agentic projects get cancelled

Source: https://tpiros.dev/agentic-projects

A taught half-day for technology leadership on the three reasons agentic AI projects get cancelled, and how to see each of them coming.

Remote, half a day, one company's leadership team at a time. No pre-work: nothing to prepare, no data to send, no access to any system.

## The premise

Gartner predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027, giving three reasons: escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls (press release, 25 June 2025). All three are engineering problems with early warnings, and all three are decided by senior people who were never shown the choice.

Gartner also names "agent washing": vendors rebranding existing chatbots and assistants as agents without changing what they do. Their analyst Anushree Verma describes most current agentic projects as early experiments driven by hype and often misapplied.

## What it covers

- Telling a working agent from a rebranded chatbot, which is presented as a procurement question and is really a technical one.
- Why a pilot that cost pennies becomes expensive at volume: context re-read on every step, invisible retries, and cost that scales with how long a task takes rather than with how many people use it.
- Deciding what "better" means before the work starts, because without it the only number left is spend, and spend alone always argues for stopping.
- What an agent may see, what it may do, and who approves the parts that touch customers or money. Gartner expects 40% of enterprises to demote or decommission agents by 2027 over governance gaps found only after a production incident.

## What a leadership team can do afterwards

- Spot a rebranded chatbot in the first ten minutes of a vendor demo.
- Surface a cost problem while the design is still on a whiteboard.
- Recognise a pilot with no definition of success before it consumes a year.
- Say what would have to be true for an agent to be allowed near a customer or a payment.
- Explain a cancellation to a board as judgement rather than retreat.

## Who it is not for

Organisations that have not started building with AI, engineers who want to build this themselves (better served by the Agent Workshop at https://tpiros.dev/agent-workshop), and anyone looking for a vendor recommendation. The session is provider-agnostic.

## On sourcing

The widely repeated claim that 88% of agent pilots never reach production is credited variously to IDC, Forrester and Gartner depending on the source, so it is deliberately absent. Figures used are traceable to the publisher's own reporting.

## Next step

Email hello@tamaspiros.com with what your team is building and what has stalled, or book a call at https://calendly.com/tamas-piros/30min.