Most generative AI and custom model projects will be a bust: Gartner

Summary

AI + ML Security systems. Copyright (c) 2020 Victor Moussa/Shutterstock. No use without permission. Most generative AI and custom model projects will be a bust: Gartner To succeed, look to China Analyst firm Gartner thinks at least half of all generative AI projects “will overrun their budgeted costs due to poor architectural choices and lack of operational know-how,” and most organizations that try to build custom models “will abandon their efforts due to costs, complexity and technical debt in their deployments.”Those findings headline the Hype Cycle for Generative AI the firm published last week, which considered 30 AI technologies and found none have reached the “plateau of productivity” – Gartner-speak for products and technologies that have gone through two or three generations of evolution, stabilized, and produce verifiable real-world benefits. Gartner's Hype Cycle for Generative AI, 2026 To reach the plateau, tech ascends the Peak of Inflated Expectations, falls into the Trough of Disillusionment, and slowly climbs a Slope of Enlightenment. Gartner labels Domain-specific GenAI models – models built from scratch or fine-tuned on domain data – as likely to produce superior results and fewer hallucinations compared to the output of general-purpose models in fields such as healthcare, finance, law and other industries. But the firm advises building these models “requires significant compute resources, specialized expertise and ongoing maintenance,” and rates their maturity as “adolescent” and placed it just before the Peak of Inflated Expectations and at least two to five years from becoming mature enough for mainstream use. Just one of the technologies Gartner considered is climbing the slope: Generative-AI-enabled applications such as coding assistants, graphics and video creation, and summarizing content. The firm worries that intellectual property concerns and the tendency to create inaccurate output continue to plague these tools but feels rapid evolution ...