Only 6% of companies fully trust AI agents to autonomously run their core business processes, highlighting a stark gap between enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and confidence in turning it loose on the most critical workflows.
That’s just one of the headline findings from a new Harvard Business Review Analytic Services research report, sponsored by automation platform provider Workato and Amazon Web Services, which surveyed 603 business and technology leaders worldwide in July 2025.
The report finds that while agentic AI—systems that can make decisions and take actions with minimal human supervision—is spreading quickly, trust remains tightly constrained to lower-risk work.
For example, 43% of respondents said they only trust AI agents with limited or routine operational tasks, and 39% restrict them to supervised use cases or noncore processes. The pattern underscores a cautious posture: most enterprises are willing to experiment, but not yet ready to let AI agents make unsupervised decisions that affect finances, customers, or the workforce at scale.
Adoption outpaces readiness
