Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects face cancellation by end of 2027. Most will be narrated as technology failures. Look closer and the pattern is financial: teams that built fast discover they've inherited platform-scale obligations on a prototype-scale budget.
The trajectory is remarkably consistent. Ship an agent, wire up basic logging, call it supervised. Within months, evaluation suites, audit infrastructure, model migration cycles, and governance layers arrive uninvited. Engineering maintenance alone runs $3,000 to $6,000 monthly per mid-complexity agent. Development environments, with their clean data and cooperative inputs, never hinted at any of this.
By the time the true operating cost surfaces, the project is already under executive scrutiny with no clean exit.