Ruh-roh! In Gartner’s annual Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, GenAI is heading toward the trough of disillusionment!

Every year, Gartner releases Hype Cycles for various technologies. As they note in their explanation of Hype Cycles here, Gartner’s Hype Cycle methodology gives you a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of your specific business goals. Each Hype Cycle drills down into the five key phases of a technology’s life cycle:

• Innovation Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
• Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
• Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
• Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
• Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.

Last month, Gartner released their Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2025. And guess what? After passing the Peak of Inflated Expectations last year, GenAI has started down the path toward the Trough of Disillusionment! As Gartner states here: “AI leaders continue to face challenges when it comes to proving GenAI’s value to the business. Despite an average spend of $1.9 million on GenAI initiatives in 2024, less than 30% of AI leaders report their CEOs are happy with AI investment return. Low-maturity organizations have trouble identifying suitable use cases and exhibit unrealistic expectations for initiatives. Mature organizations, meanwhile, struggle to find skilled professionals and instill GenAI literacy. 

More broadly, organizations face governance challenges (e.g. hallucinations, bias and fairness) and government regulations that may impede GenAI applications for productivity, automation and evolving job roles.”

Notable, but the fact that GenAI is heading toward the trough of disillusionment is no reason to panic – this happens with pretty much every new technology. The only question is how long it stays down before heading back up on the slope of enlightenment.

So, what is on the rise. According to Gartner, “the two biggest movers on this year’s Hype Cycle are AI-ready data and AI agents. Both sit at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.” Not surprised about AI agents being at the peak – Agentic AI has been the buzzword of the year – at least based on my observations.

So, why don’t I have a picture of the Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence on this blog post? Because it appears to still only be able to those who pay for the report and companies that license the report from Gartner for distribution. If you Google “Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2025”, you should see companies that have done so and you can go get the report from one of them for free (I did), if you’re willing to provide your email address and other info. It’s worth it, as it discusses many other AI technologies besides genAI and where they sit on the Hype Cycle. I will add the picture later if it becomes publicly available.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that GenAI is heading toward the trough of disillusionment? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4o’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot standing at the edge of a cliff looking at the abyss below”.

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