AI agents face production gap despite high ROI potential

Enterprises are facing a significant gap between the ambition to deploy AI agents and the ability to move them into production. While research from IDC and Microsoft indicates that successful AI agent deployments can deliver a 171% global return on investment (rising to 192% in the United States), a massive disconnect remains in execution.

Reports from Gartner, Forrester, and Anaconda suggest that between 86% and 88% of AI agent pilots fail to reach production. This bottleneck is largely attributed to operational and structural challenges rather than technological limitations. Common issues include a lack of clear success criteria, with 41% of deployments showing negative ROI after 12 months due to undefined goals.

In the industrial sector, research commissioned by IFS and Futurum highlights a similar maturity gap. Although 66% of enterprises plan to invest in digital workers over the next year, only 10% currently run mostly autonomous AI operations. Manufacturers are primarily targeting materials planning, customer orders, and inventory to address capacity gaps, yet many organizations struggle with the internal capacity required to implement these strategic initiatives.