Gartner: "Agent Washing" Risks in Agentic AI Adoption

Supply chain planning organizations rushing to adopt agentic AI face risks from hype and "agent washing," according to Gartner. Many current agentic capabilities improve user experience with things like query interpretation and conversational support. However, they don't fundamentally change decision quality or how decisions are made. Here's the thing: true autonomous planning would involve automatic plan generation, optimal plan selection, and seamless execution without human input. Most current solutions haven't reached this level of end-to-end autonomy. Vendors claiming full autonomous supply chain planning before 2027 are overstating what's possible. What's interesting is "agent washing" further obscures these differences by relabeling conventional automation as agentic. This increases the risk of misaligned investments and long-term lock-in. Jan Snoeckx, a Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, advises supply chain leaders to prepare for an agentic AI future but to separate meaningful capability from market noise. He stresses that the priority is not full autonomy today, but building operational discipline and flexible architectures. This matters because avoiding these pitfalls can help organizations improve productivity now while preparing for more advanced agentic capabilities later.