According to tech billionaire and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 2025 was supposed to be the year “when AI agents will work.”

Despite widespread hype, so-called “AI agents” — a software product that’s supposed to complete human-level tasks autonomously — have yet to live up to their name. As of April, even the best AI agent could only finish 24 percent of the jobs assigned to it. Still, that didn’t stop business executives from swarming to the software like flies to roadside carrion, gutting entire departments worth of human workers to make way for their AI replacements.

But as AI agents have yet to even pay for themselves — spilling their employer’s embarrassing secrets all the while — more and more executives are waking up to the sloppy reality of AI hype.

A recent survey by the business analysis and consulting firm Gartner, for instance, found that out of 163 business executives, a full half said their plans to “significantly reduce their customer service workforce” would be abandoned by 2027.

This is forcing corporate PR spinsters to rewrite speeches about AI “transcending automation,” instead leaning on phrases like “hybrid approach” and “transitional challenges” to describe the fact that they still need humans to run a workplace.

“The human touch remains irreplaceable in many interactions, and organizations must balance technology with human empathy and understanding,” said Kathy Ross, Gartner’s senior director of customer service and support analysis.

That’s a vibe employees have been feeling for a while now. Another report, this one by IT firm GoTo and research agency Workplace Intelligence, found that 62 percent of employees are currently saying that AI is “significantly overhyped.”

Likewise, only 45 percent of corporate IT managers reported having a formal AI policy in place, suggesting a scattered and hasty rollout of the tech. Of those IT leaders, 56 percent said “security concerns” and “integration challenges” were the main barriers to AI adoption.

The reports come as a number of businesses have already made the humiliating walk-back of shame in recent weeks.

Finance startup Klarna, for example, reduced its workforce by 22 percent throughout 2024 ahead of the long-promised AI revolution. But then the company did an about-face on its AI strategy back in May, announcing a “recruitment drive” to bring all those meat bags back to work.

According to tech critic Ed Zitron, the whole agentic charade can be explained by the fact that “it isn’t obvious what any of these AI-powered products do, and when you finally work it out, they don’t seem to do that much.”

“These ‘agents’ are branded to sound like intelligent lifeforms that can make intelligent decisions,” Zitron writes, “but are really just trumped-up automations that require enterprise customers to invest time programming them.”

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