Agentic AI is dominating headlines and the enterprise technology sector, but the impact on the IT budget remains to be seen. Agentic AI is promising, but it's going to take more prototypes and proof of ROI to get the budgets rolling.
That's a takeaway from Crawford Del Prete, President of IDC, who appeared on DisrupTV. Del Prete was talking about the volatile IT budget dynamics in 2025 and said:
"The challenge I see when I talk to CIOs is when they think about AI and beyond is that they don't know where to start. This is particularly a problem with agents because when they look at agents they say, 'I'm skeptical. I know it's going to require significant human oversight. It's going to hallucinate. So, I can't just let this thing run, but I'm afraid not to run with it. I know I have to invest in it, but my budgets are under pressure.' I think we're going to see maybe a little bit of a lean back in the agent world over the course of the next couple quarters."
These comments about spending on AI agents is notable given that vendors are launching new agents and orchestration engines almost daily. Another day, another AI studio. Meanwhile, vendors are switching to hybrid models that include AI agents and genAI capabilities, but feature consumption models that may create budget volatility.
Here’s the state of agentic AI in a nutshell:
- The data wars are just starting and agentic AI may be a trigger
- AI agents bring consumption models to SaaS: Goldilocks or headache?
- Agentic AI: Three themes to watch for 2025
- Agentic AI without process optimization, orchestration will flop
- AI? Whatever. It's all about the first party data
- Enterprise AI: Here are the trends to know right now
Del Prete was upbeat about AI agents. "You've finally got a technology that can unlock the value of your unstructured data in a very automated way. But I'm seeing customers not knowing how to engage, but afraid not to engage. I think we're going to see that push-pull play out over middle of this year, until people can start getting decent prototypes moving forward," said Del Prete.
Constellation Research CEO Ray "R" Wang noted that there are a lot of vendors adding agents to every marketing sentence available. Wang said agentic AI needs to get to the point where agents become an API with a decisioning engine. Agentic AI is very basic right now, said Wang.
Del Prete noted that oversight remains an issue with AI agents across multiple use cases. "We have a lot of work to do before we can set these things loose and feel like they're as in production," he said. "They're not as easy to put into production as people think based on the media that you see associated with it."
Nevertheless, agentic AI will pull budget. "I haven't found a company yet that's willing to lean back and say, yeah, I'm not going to invest. I don't think this thing is real," said Del Prete.
Gurvinder Sahni, Chief Marketing Officer at Persistent Systems, said the company is betting on agentic AI--a space where integrators that can work across multiple systems and domains can create AI agents that actually work
Wang noted that systems integrators and services companies have done well building agents relative to software vendors because they're used to cutting across departments, functions and business processes.
Sahni said:
"We recently trained about 1,000 plus people on Salesforce Agentforce. The other big part for us is the focus on our own IP and also working with the hyperscalers and the ecosystem to build products and services with them as well."
