AI Agent Ambition vs. Reality: Enterprises Expect Mass 2027 Deployment, But ‘Sprawl’ and Skills Gaps Keep 97% From Scaling

If 2025 feels like the year AI agents finally arrived, 2027 may make it look tame by comparison, with analysts projecting an outright surge in enterprise-grade bots. But for now, even as companies adopt these digital workers, their ambitions far outpace their execution; 97 percent have yet to figure out how to scale agents across their organizations, held back by gaps in training, observability, and integration.

In a new IDC report commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS), more than 900 enterprises worldwide shared their views on adopting AI agents. An additional 100 software vendors were surveyed to understand how agents are used in their solutions and what partners are looking for. It doesn’t cast dispersion on the use of bots, though it exposes a huge gap between expectation and reality. This could affect how much an organization invests in AI technologies, especially if it can’t generate an acceptable Return on Investment.

“We get a lot of questions from those companies about how they should think about investing and how they should be thinking about changing their business strategy, because there are some real challenges as they start to embrace agentic AI, in particular,” Jeffrey Hammond, AWS’s head of ISV product management transformation, tells The AI Economy in an interview. “We wanted to get this data—both for our own internal use, but also to share with our partners—so that they can use that data to make decisions.”

One takeaway he highlights is that among organizations, there’s “a lot of high hopes” and “some aggressive plans” with AI agents. “The majority of them (64.6 percent) hope to have agentic technology fully deployed by 2027,” Hammond says. What “full deployment” means wasn’t defined, though this is a trend he’s seen before with companies being “very aggressive” and “overly optimistic” about adopting new technologies.

“Folks want to get benefits from these technologies, want to use these technologies, think that they’re going to be able to do that very, very quickly,” he remarks. “We’ll see in two years whether or not the reality matches the spirit.”

The ‘Agent Sprawl’ Problem

“The current landscape of enterprise AI agent adoption reflects a stage of experimentation and innovation in pursuit of the promised benefits of agentic AI,” Tim Law, an IDC research director and author of the study, writes. “It marks an initial phase of rapid adoption of new technologies ot implement, manage, and integrate agentic AI with existing enterprise workflows. It is a landscape marked by an explosion of new, more capable agents, tools, and frameworks.”

Tech firms like AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce have made AI agents increasingly ubiquitous, giving organizations the tools to deploy them readily. These software vendors are all pushing toward the same vision: companies where humans and autonomous systems work side by side. Whether you call it an “agentic enterprise” or “Frontier Firm,” the idea is the same—a fundamental reshaping of how modern organizations operate in the AI era.

It sparked a kind of “Field of Dreams” moment—agents sprang up everywhere, but simply making them easy to build hasn’t been enough. Organizations may be eager to enter their agentic era, yet many have struggled to translate that enthusiasm into real value. A development platform alone wasn’t enough to unlock the full potential of this technology.

All of this has led to “agent sprawl,” a situation in which organizations have too many agents scattered across teams, tools, and workflows, built quickly and inconsistently, and without any thought for how they fit into a broader strategy. Executives are left scratching their heads about why these AI programs aren’t generating value. The path forward hinges on stronger observability, better-trained employees, smoother integrations with existing systems, lower operational costs, and tighter security controls.

Snapshot of Agent Use

If 2025 isn’t quite the “year of the agent” and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy is right that fully functional AI agents are still a decade away, what does the current landscape actually look like? Here’s how enterprises are using AI agents today, according to IDC data.

Agents, Agents, Everywhere

• Nearly half of respondents (49.3 percent) have at least ten agents in production. Most fall into the 10-49 agents range (34.3 percent), while a smaller share report 50-99 agents (10 percent) or 100-499 agents (5.3 percent). Only a sliver has crossed the 500-agent mark.
• More than two-thirds of organizations (67 percent) have at least ten agents in development. Most are clustered in the 10-49 range (42.2 percent), with another 22 percent working on 50-99 agents, and a small 2.6 percent building between 100 and 499 agents.
• When it comes to different approaches to AI agents, over 42 percent of organizations say they’ve integrated bots into existing third-party applications, while 46 percent are still exploring or piloting internal development. Only seven percent have moved at least one use case into production.
• A majority (61.8 percent) of organizations are purchasing and customizing pre-built agents, while over a third (32.4 percent) are leveraging agents that come natively integrated with their applications. Meanwhile, 29.3 percent are choosing to build fully custom agents from scratch.
• Only 2.9 percent admit they’re scaling agentic use cases across departments.

Workforce Adoption

• Nearly half of organizations (47 percent) report strong engagement with AI agents, with 30.3 percent saying end-user adoption is high and 17.1 percent calling it very high. Another third (33.8 percent) see moderate use, while 18 percent are struggling to get employees actually to use the technology.
• Most organizations (54.6 percent) say employees manage AI agents effectively (37.4 percent) or very effectively (17.2 percent). Nearly a third (28.7 percent) feel users are only somewhat effective at managing them.
• In terms of agent complexity, 44 percent of firms are blending custom-built and purchased agents to handle tasks. More than a third (37.4 percent) are coordinating multi-agent systems, while 27.8 percent are deploying agents from multiple providers. At the most advanced level, less than a quarter (22.4 percent) are using agents powered by multiple large language models (LLMs).

Agentic Adoption Isn’t as ‘Dire’

While MIT’s Nanda study paints a far more cautious picture, one where most companies remain in early experimentation, the AWS-commissioned IDC research suggests a more active and, in some cases, more ambitious landscape. “The survey respondent reported numbers are not as dire as what you see in the Nanda report,” Hammond declares. He points to the 37.4 percent of firms deploying multi-agent solutions as an example, noting that, while it’s hardly universal, it’s a sign that adoption may be shifting from early adopters to the early mainstream.

“It’s going to take time to understand the things that work best and the use cases that drive the most business value,” Hammond shares, adding that while the data suggests 65 percent of organizations are expected to reach full deployment by 2027, he thinks it could take a little bit longer to achieve “full deployment.” That said, he disputes claims that companies aren’t seeing real ROI from agents now.

“There are absolutely organizations that are getting a lot of value out of the deployment of agentic technology today. But we also see things like the MIT Nanda report, which says that a lot of things don’t necessarily get into full scale that start as [proof of concept], so you have to rationalize that in terms of how you look at a piece of data and then say, ‘what’s really going on?’”

Hammond references Vital Healthcare, an AWS partner operating in Australia and New Zealand. “They are already deployed, driving business value with agentic technology. They’re reducing the cost to serve in the emergency room around the detection of incidental findings and follow up on that. So it’s absolutely happening.”

Very Few Are Scaling Agentic AI

Although IDC’s study may paint a slightly more “glass-half-full” picture, it shows that enterprises have a long way to go before becoming truly automation-powered organizations. Despite agentic use growing, fewer than three percent of firms are extending the technology across their teams—it’s a statistic that surprises Hammond the most.

“I thought that number would be higher, and it may just be because I work with a lot of companies that have already done that—they’ve scaled it. It’s in their products. It’s embedded in what they sell. And now we’re having questions about how do we price it, how do we make sure that users have access to hybrid buckets of tokens, and that sort of thing. That’s the difference between working with software companies on a daily basis versus working with more enterprise organizations.”

He attributes the slow uptake to a deficiency in skills training. For many, AI is on-the-job learning, so leaders must appropriately support employees. It’s a sentiment apparently shared by survey respondents, with education a major concern slowing AI adoption (more on this a little later).

That Best in Class vs. Best in Suite Debate

But proving agents are generating returns today wasn’t the goal of this IDC study. Instead, it set out to see how organizations are utilizing multiple agents—are they operating them in tandem? Using them from different vendors? Or are they blending custom-built and purchased solutions?

Why is this important? Understanding how these multi-agent solutions are being deployed provides a window into where AI may be driving the most change. IDC’s data reveals that some organizations are deploying them within their own cloud accounts, while others opt for their SaaS products. This “then leads you to an interesting kind of question about how these solutions evolve, because you can deploy a multi-agent solution where all the agents are from a single software company.”

Hammond cites Treasure Data as an example: “They’ve built a number of agents on top of [Amazon] Bedrock that are set to work together for customers that are trying to define customer segments and then use that for hyper-personalization use cases, but it’s all within the Treasure Data environment.”

However, for those situations where software vendors develop AI agents, he asks, “Did those go into the software company environments, or do they stay in the company environments? That’s where I don’t think we have a lot of clarity, because we see that the respondents and the survey say, ‘we’re going to deploy in both of those situations.’ And if you add up the [percentage totals] of the respondents that want to deploy in the different areas, it’s more than 100 percent.”

“The net takeaway is we’re going to see multiple ways that these agents get deployed,” Hammond continues, “Those heterogeneous agentic use cases fascinate me because the observability that you need to support that, the data integration that you need to support that, how you bill if some of those things are purchased agents, are problems that need to be solved. It’s hard for me to think that we’re going to see hundreds of companies trying to solve those problems over and over again on their own.”

He predicts that within two years, we might see “common services, standards, [and] frameworks” put in place if “that heterogeneous reality is going to be where companies are.”

The Multi-Agent Balancing Act

“What you see is that some of the most valuable stuff, these complex tasks that require multiple agents, are absolutely happening out there, but the adoption numbers are lower than somebody saying, ‘We’re using a research agent and a lot of our employees are using it, and that’s increasingly broadly deployed,’” Hammond explains. “That was one of the things that we wanted to test—where is the market with respect to some of the more advanced use cases?”

Introducing an agent into an organization is only the first step toward becoming an AI-first firm. The real transformation comes from combining these autonomous tools into a coordinated workflow or system that reimagines how business is done. It’s one thing for every worker to use ChatGPT, but full deployment looks different: Employees might use the generative AI chatbot to draft content, while another agent monitors performance metrics, oversees project progress, and then feeds insights to a personalization agent that tailors content for different audience segments. This illustrates how bots could redefine the marketing function.

“Where’s the greatest toil in your product today that your customers don’t like, the thing that they have to do over and over again, that they have to repeat, which doesn’t provide a lot of value? Those are the areas for automation that agents can potentially deliver a step order change,” Hammond remarks.

From Experimentation to Scale

As noted earlier, IDC estimates an “explosion” of enterprise agents within the next two years. What does it look like when these bots are fully deployed throughout an organization?

The research shows that by 2027, 63.6 percent of organizations will have launched at least ten agents, a 14.3 percentage-point increase from today. Even more notable is how agent deployment is expected to shift: the share of firms with 10-49 agents deployed will drop to 25.8 percent (down 16.4 points), those with 50-99 agents will fall to 14.2 percent (down eight points), while firms with 100-499 agents will rise to 21.7 percent (up 19.1 points), and those with more than 500 agents will increase slightly to 1.9 percent (up more than a point).

In other words, while 2025 sees the enterprise running relatively few agents, in two years, more firms are projected to scale up dramatically, with a growing number managing hundreds of agents across their operations.

Again, it’s not enough that companies have individual agents launched. They need to connect in the same way humans collaborate and become an effective team. However, more work is required to make this hybrid workforce a reality, especially by 2027.

IDC finds that more than two-thirds of organizations (66.5 percent) say employees need additional skills training to use and manage AI agents effectively. Over half (55.3 percent) believe adoption would speed up with improved user experiences. Other key factors for boosting adoption include greater accuracy and more trusted results (46.3 percent), clearer communication from leadership on the corporate AI strategy (43.8 percent), and higher-quality outputs (41.4 percent).

None of these should be surprising, as they’ve largely been brought up multiple times over the past year. Case in point, software vendors such as Salesforce, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Zoom have launched initiatives to re- and upskill workers. Nevertheless, the fact that these concerns keep being raised proves that more work is needed, and companies have to take AI initiatives more seriously.

“The data tells me that a lot of these respondents are in what I could call a trust-building phase with respect to how they’re using agents,” Hammond says. He argues that keeping humans in the loop helps build trust between employees and agents—a strategy that a recent McKinsey report identifies as a hallmark of AI leaders.

“When you’re thinking about how you design high-value use cases, as you’re going through that trust phase, using techniques like human in the loop is one of the ways that you increase your rate of success. That’s where, when we look at the folks that are successful, that have deployed at scale, that you know are out there making money, you see this sort of humans and computers working together in a very effective way.”

How to Move Forward

In his report’s conclusion, Law calls out the critical role cloud providers will play in agentic adoption. Because organizations are already using vendors like AWS for their LLMs, AI tools, frameworks, and infrastructure, they’ll go with the platform they’re comfortable with for all things agentic. That said, “cloud providers will need to work closely with their ISV ecosystem to ensure customer success in adopting and customizing AI agents.”

What does Hammond suggest business and IT leaders do with IDC’s latest research? When asked, he replies that companies need a “solid” vetting process for use cases, and that it should be focused on generating business value rather than being solely technology-focused.

“Start with the premise of the business value… there are a couple of basic questions I always ask: Where are the greatest opportunities for toil reduction? Where can you light up dark data that provides value? Where can you automate the generation—not just of static artifacts like content, but executable artifacts like calendar appointments, code, deployment pipelines, or those sorts of things? So, when you take what generative AI is good at, what agentic AI on top of that is good at, and then you start to look at where the opportunities are, that starts to create a value-focused approach that lets you prioritize the most impactful use cases for immediate work.”

He goes on to add, “the second thing that I would look at as part of that is that question of scoping, complexity, [and] data value, because then that lets you take the business value and say, ‘Our ability to be successful in automating that business value is high, medium, or low. So if we can find things that drive a lot of business value, our likelihood of success in automating is also going to be high. Why wouldn’t we take those and make those our first wins?’”

Hammond stresses that organizations also shouldn’t ignore the “unsexy back office stuff,” as these areas often provide some of the greatest opportunities for real, measurable business value from AI.

He wraps up our interview by offering these words: “Because the appetite is high and the adoption is happening, if you’re not experimenting, there is a high risk of getting left behind by your competitors. You’ve got to be willing to run experiments. You’ve got to be willing to run tests, use techniques like the human in the loop to deal with the fact that you may still be figuring out trust issues, and it’s only in understanding what the potential capabilities are that you’re going to stay up and keep up with your competition.”

This report lands just ahead of Amazon’s annual re:Invent conference, scheduled for December. Hammond avoids giving specifics about what AWS will showcase, but it’s reasonable to expect the company to lean into many of the themes outlined in the IDC findings, namely how enterprises can tap into multi-agent systems more effectively and what it takes to build use cases that actually deliver results.

Disclosure: I am attending AWS’ 2025 re:Invent as a guest, with a portion of my travel expenses covered by the company. However, Amazon did not influence the content of this post—these thoughts are entirely my own.

Featured Image: An AI-generated image depicting autonomous agents coming together to create multi-agent system for the enterprise a la Voltron. Credit: Google Gemini