Glossary term
Glossary term
Governance and Compliance
Agent washing, per Gartner, is branding simple bots or rule-based tools as Agentic AI without true autonomy, reasoning, or orchestration, misleading buyers with the agent label on systems that cannot think, plan, or adapt.
Gartner's June 2025 press release estimated only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors actually deliver genuine agentic capabilities.
Vendors rebranding scripted chatbots and basic RPA flows as AI agents during the 2025 hype cycle are cited as agent-washing examples by Gartner analyst Anushree Verma.
CRM integrations marketed as activity mapping agents and call recorders labelled as transcription agents are common agent-washing patterns flagged by industry analysts.