AI and its main promoters are not enterprise-ready, says Gartner

The more AI you use, the harder it is to control it or generate return on investment, according to analyst firm Gartner. That firm delivered that glum view of AI at its annual IT Symposium, the first edition of which takes place in Australia before moving Europe and the USA. The Australian event saw distinguished VP analysts Daryl Plummer and Kristin Moyer argue that AI and its leading proponents remain immature. Asked to comment on working with the leading AI labs, Plummer said: “Trust in these vendors is not warranted yet. They are not enterprise grade. They don't understand enterprise terms and conditions. They don't understand enterprise liability. They don't understand enterprise you know consistency and continuity.” He pointed to AI companies’ practice of frequently altering their models seemingly without thought for how or if those updates might break applications that depend on their output. “It's an out-of-control pace of innovation, and the sad thing is you can't afford not to follow it,” Plummer said, because AI companies are yet to develop a willingness to support legacy technology even though the lifespan of their models is about six months. “If you decide to stay with the first version of a model, they're not going to be paying attention to you very much. That alone says they're not enterprise ready,” he said. Moyer cited Gartner research that found 86 percent of CIOs see risks created by AI growing faster than the value it creates, in part because early successes with AI create more demand to use the technology than IT departments can safely satisfy. Some of that demand is what Moyer called “careless consumption” – workers using AI frivolously or when it is not necessary or appropriate. She cited research that found 40 percent of workers have encountered AI slop and that deciphering such content typically takes two hours – or $9 million worth of work across a year at a 1,000-person organization. Good luck stopping careless consumption, Moyer said, because “It is hard to even know how many agents you have. AI is invading your enterprise inside products you already own.” Moyer thinks enterprises should have some experience of controlling careless consumption, having spent a decade winding back developer’s preference to use the most powerful and costly cloud computing instances they can access. Plummer offered another example of how to control AI use: remembering alternative and proven automation technologies. He said building an agent to interact with a database is foolish, because a good old-fashioned function call can well and truly handle the job. He also blamed some careless use of AI on vendors, who he said “are desperate to monetise AI” by selling you products that include it, or just having you buy more tokens. “Vendors want you to use agents everywhere,” he said. The Register asked the pair about the efficiency of AIOps – the approach that sees vendors use agents to detect the source of problems and recommend a one-click fix. Plummer said such offerings are dishonest. “They are going in the right direction, but they have the wrong motivations,” he said. “Their motivations are to market to you and get you to buy their stuff, not to get you to put in the right solution because their stuff probably isn't the right solution.” This behavior, he said, is typical of the sales cycle for new technology and appears to be playing out as vendors create governance tools they say will make it possible to run AI safely. Plummer said the market for those products is “one of the most fragmented things we have ever seen.” Safe as a bank The two analysts recommended several actions to tame AI. One is establishing an “AI central bank” that has responsibility to oversee use of AI across an organization to ensure its ongoing health by considering the systemic impact of the technology. A key role for that central bank is ensuring accountability, a factor the pair said is easy to establish with conventional ERP or CRM applications that leave an audit trail of who performed or authorized actions AI does not always leave that evidence, Moyer said. “It is not easy to know who goes to jail,” she quipped. “If you do not have a digital evidence system for AI, think about it!” The firm also thinks AI users need the ability to take out rogue AI with “guardian agents” – AI tasked solely with observing agents to ensure their behaviour stays within intended bounds. Plummer said those agents must have the power to “kill” rogue agents. A third recommendation was to establish disaster recovery teams dedicated to unwinding messes made by AI. “If you are called to account and your answer is ‘AI did it’, you are in trouble,” he said. “CIOs will be held accountable for AI failures.” ®

source https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/14/ai-and-its-main-promoters-are-not-enterprise-ready-says-gartner/5296074