Most businesses are struggling to adopt artificial intelligence effectively, with some companies burning through budgets prematurely while others use the technology as a scapegoat for job cuts.
Fewer than one in five companies are using the technology to its best advantage, experts say, while almost one in three are only experimenting with it.
Gartner researchers issued the warnings on Tuesday at the company's Data and Analytics Summit in Sydney, where they also predicted AI agents could take over some tasks but were not ready to replace human employees.
The predictions come after tech firms, including Amazon and Atlassian, announced large-scale lay-offs due to AI adoption, while others struggled with the cost of accessing AI tokens.
Uber, for example, revealed it had exhausted its 2026 AI coding budget within four months after a company-wide push to use the technology.
