AI Agents

By 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024.  Software engineering leaders should prepare their teams for an AI-native era defined by developer creativity, agentic workflows and rapid feedback loops, while mitigating risks. Therefore, agentic AI, AI agents and Gen AI will be a key focus at Gartner Application and Innovation Business Solutions Summit 2025!

Seventy-seven percent of organizations are using or testing AI code assistants, with CIOs expecting increased developer productivity and viewing AI code generation as transformative. Early previews of agentic workflows demonstrate the ability to translate user intent into actions, signaling potential for reduced drudge work but raising concerns around governance risks. The path to AI-native software engineering involves a continuously increasing percentage of autonomous and semiautonomous tasks across software development activities.

Watch our session on the ‘Generative AI in Enterprise Applications: Navigating the Hype and Preparing for What Comes Next’ where Patrick Connaughton, VP Analyst at Gartner, evaluated native AI features versus third-party solutions, and examined the pros and cons of each. The session covered starting strategies, short to mid-term planning, and success measurement in leveraging AI for enterprise applications.

• AI agents in software engineering step beyond AI code assistants to act as autonomous autopilots for software development and testing tasks. They have the potential to:
• Enhance developer experience by autonomously performing mundane tasks and removing friction points across the software development life cycle (SDLC), enabling developers to focus on more creative and complex challenges.
• Increase the ability of software engineers to deliver business value, especially when integrating AI agents into multiagentic workflows. 
• Improve your cost efficiency by enabling your teams to deliver more software with the same number of people and resources, or deliver the same amount of software with fewer people and expenses.  

Gartner Software Engineering Survey for 2024 found that 58% of respondents said they currently use or plan to use generative AI over the next 12 months to control or reduce costs in their software engineering organizations.

We have a dedicated spotlight track for Artificial Intelligence in 2025 and sessions combining AI and developer experience. Sample sessions include:

• Top 10 Reasons Why Generative AI Projects Fail and How to Fix It
• Ask the Expert: Impact of Agentic AI on the Future of ERP
• Use Platform Engineering to Empower Your Organization With GenAI

• Agents that can autonomously select and use tools (via features APIs and function calling) must be constrained by robust guardrails that ensure their actions are aligned to the provider’s intentions and properly reflect user intent. 
• Monitoring and governing the behavior of AI agents in deployment requires new techniques and tools, since their behavior will change and adapt as they memorize both shared and user-specific context over time. 
• The deployment of AI agents that continuously evolve must come with a security plan that monitors the AI agents and has forward-looking guardrails.

For 2025, two of our key topics include AI agents and Dev Productivity and Dev Experience. We will focus on end users building their own agents to complete tasks or to pull insights from structured and unstructured data and how good DevEx, combined with the right tools, boosts satisfaction, reduces burnout and enhances productivity.