Gartner expects that by 2028 around 70 percent of companies will abandon AI agents that a vendor's engineers built for them on site. The causes cited are rising costs and a lack of in-house knowledge to carry the solution forward.
The pattern is familiar. From ERP projects we know custom developments that nobody can adapt once the consultant has left. With agents, instructions, model versions and test cases are part of the solution as well, and operating costs are hard to forecast.
Our recommendation: before signing, record who owns configuration and test cases, who takes over operations, which metric measures the benefit and what an orderly wind-down looks like. The forecast is an estimate, but its direction matches our experience.