Definition
Gartner used the term in June 2025, estimating that only about 130 of the thousands of vendors claiming agentic AI offered genuine agentic capabilities. Agent washing makes it harder for buyers to compare products and contributes to projects that are cancelled once the gap between promise and capability shows.
The test is practical: can the system pursue a goal over several steps, choose and use tools, and recover from errors, on your real tasks and data?