--- title: "Companies That Adopted AI Agents Alarmed to Discover They’re Botching Incredibly Important Tasks" description: "An estimated 40 percent of AI agentic programs will collapse due to poor risk controls, as the tools are capable of inflicting massive harm." date: "2026-05-27" modified: "2026-05-27" authors: - name: "Joe Wilkins" job_title: "Correspondent" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jwilkins" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/companies-ai-agents-botching-important-tasks" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Machine Learning" --- # Companies That Adopted AI Agents Alarmed to Discover They’re Botching Incredibly Important Tasks ![An image of a businessman in the dark opening his laptop up, lit from underneath with one hand held up in shock. He is surprised by what he sees onscreen.]() *Shutterstock / Futurism* AI agents used to be [all the rage](), the supposed next hit product category after generative AI failed to generate [productive returns](). Now, the bill on all that hype is coming due. According to some estimates, up to [79 percent]() of US corporate execs have some type of AI agent in the making — but one Gartner prediction found [40 percent]() of these projects will implode due to poor risk controls. In a nutshell, AI agents are capable of inflicting tremendous amounts of damage on a company when instructed to complete critical tasks. One particularly glaring example, outlined by network consulting engineer [Sayali Patil in *VentureBeat*](), involves AI agents designed to fix slow network connections when they detect problems. That sounds like a reasonable task to automate, like unplugging your router when your wifi starts acting up. But while these AI agents can technically get the job done, Patil says she's had incidents where they shut down the server while three other important services are handling a rush of web traffic. When the agent goes ahead and restarts that server anyway, it leads to disaster for those other three services. In the end, the chaotic network event becomes far more disruptive than the initial slowdown. Worse yet, the critical failure becomes too much for the AI tool to understand, or as Patil puts it, a "cascade the agent was never designed to model." "The blast radius of that agent action was not the service restart. It was everything downstream of the restart, in a system state the agent had no complete picture of," Patil writes. Even if engineers were able to account for every pitfall, AI agents still present some horrifying security vulnerabilities. Stress tests of AI agents equipped with email privileges revealed some major pain points, like where agents [obey strangers]() from outside their network or [transfer data]() to unauthorized personnel. This gap between performance expectations and production reality is precisely why AI agents aren't the one-size-fits-all tool the tech industry desperately wants them to be. Whether that changes in the long view is anyone's guess — but today's reality is falling way behind the hype. **More on AI in the workplace:** *[99 Percent of CEOs Are Preparing to Lay Off Workers and Replace Them With AI Within Two Years, Survey Finds]()* ## Author At Futurism, I focus on the intersection of technology and power — examining the economics, history, and politics behind today’s dystopian headlines. As a writer, I’m interested in topics ranging from AI’s impact on labor to startups nobody asked for. My prior work includes bylines in Jacobin, Verso, and Blue Labyrinths. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Time, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Verge, and Wired. I grew up in Michigan, attending Central Michigan University as well as Ball State University, where I earned a master of music. I now live in Brooklyn with my girlfriend and our cat Ziti. On weekends, you can find me hunched over a cold pint arguing geopolitics with the other transplants. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()