n a crowded AI subscriptions market, enterprises are increasingly prioritizing tools that deliver measurable results.
A new study from research firm Gartner found that by 2028, over half of all enterprises will stop paying for assistive intelligence, including copilots and smart advisors, and instead favor platforms that deliver workflow results. This sentiment reflects a broader industry shift towards results-driven agentic solutions over chat-like interfaces that can only deliver advice.
“The market is moving away from standalone AI experiences and toward workflow-native," said Vuk Janosevic, Gartner analyst, to The Deep View. “Enterprises have made it clear that they value outcomes inside existing processes more than smart advice sitting off to the side.”
A defining characteristic of agentic AI, or an AI solution that can be categorized as taking action on a user's behalf, is granting it access to the same databases and context the user relies on daily. Any agentic solution expected to deliver meaningful outcomes must therefore be entrusted with proprietary, and often highly sensitive, data.
This reframes what enterprises are willing to pay for. It's not necessarily demand for a new category of AI, but rather a reflection of whether the AI has the authority to trigger the actions being requested. Gartner posits that the vendors who succeed will not be those that offer more AI, but those that facilitate agent orchestration, ensuring agents follow guardrails, securely access key company databases, and can identify and correct missteps.
“In practice, that means the real value is less about building one more AI platform and more about making business software capable of acting, deciding, and completing work in context and in line with compliance guardrails,” said Janosevic.
The growing shift toward automation may prompt an instinctive assumption of widespread job disruption. Janosevic, however, offered a more nuanced view that while some displacement is inevitable, entire professions are unlikely to vanish. Instead, certain roles will contract and be redesigned as new ones emerge around AI-led work.
“The deeper point is that agentic AI changes how work is organized, not just how fast it gets done,” he added.
Our Deeper View
Companies' expectations of what technology can accomplish are naturally bounded by what the technology is actually capable of, and as the AI space evolves at its current pace, it is only natural that the goalpost advances with it. The report's findings, however, surface an important takeaway for vendors: the solution may not be more AI, but rather more deliberate products designed to address a specific need. This shift is already underway, perhaps most visibly reflected in OpenAI's decision to sharpen its focus on enterprise and to deprioritize peripheral projects such as Sora.