Gartner study finds companies that cut staff for AI see no returns; those investing in workforce amplification see better results

Gartner surveyed 350 global businesses with annual revenues above $1 billion piloting or deploying intelligent automation and found around 80 percent had cut staff as a result, but companies that reduced their workforces were just as likely to see negative outcomes or marginal gains as meaningful return on investment.

Organizations seeing actual ROI improvements are investing aggressively in new skills, new roles, and operating models around humans guiding and scaling autonomous systems (agentic AI and advanced automation), rather than eliminating workforce needs.

An earlier Gartner study found that AI agents get office tasks wrong about 70 percent of the time and predicted many of these projects will collapse by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, murky business value, and inadequate risk control; despite this, agentic AI software spending is expected to grow from $86.4 billion in 2025 to $206.5 billion in 2026 and $376.3 billion in 2027.