Gartner: 70% of Custom-Built Enterprise AI Agents Will Be Abandoned...

Gartner: 70% of Custom-Built Enterprise AI Agents Will Be Abandoned by 2028

Gartner predicts that by 2028, around 70% of AI agents built for enterprises by vendor-supplied "forward-deployed engineers" (FDEs) will be abandoned. Its reasoning: while FDEs can build agents precisely tailored to a specific company's needs, that benefit is short-lived. Over time, these custom systems become harder to maintain — especially once a company stops retaining the FDE — requiring growing in-house expertise and rising costs just to keep them running.

Gartner's advice for enterprises wanting to avoid this trap: use FDEs selectively, reserving them for problems that genuinely need deep specialized expertise, projects requiring fast results, and cases where the system must integrate well with the company's existing infrastructure.

Notably, this isn't Gartner's first warning on this front — two years ago, it projected a similar failure rate at 40%, meaning its estimate has grown sharply as enterprise AI agent adoption has scaled up.