Gartner said Wednesday that 22% of chief human resources officers report at least one business leader in their organization has stopped hiring for entry-level roles because of AI automation, a data point that lands amid a broader repricing of what companies buy, staff, and defer.

The 4Q25 survey of 110 heads of HR found that 95% of organizations had implemented AI in some capacity in the past year, while only one in five had realized significant or transformational value. The gap is the story. Deployment has run ahead of returns, and the near-term absorbers are the junior desks whose work is legible enough for an agent to do.

Gartner’s May forecast points to where that money is going. AI agent software spending is projected to reach $206.5 billion in 2026 and $376.3 billion in 2027, up from $86.4 billion in 2025. Worldwide AI spending is forecast at $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% jump year over year. On July 1, Gartner separately flagged up to $234 billion of enterprise application spending as exposed to what it calls “agentic arbitrage” through 2030, meaning incumbent SaaS seats replaced by agent workflows sitting on top of them.

The demand-side signal is corroborated by CMOs. A Gartner survey of 402 marketing leaders conducted from August through October 2025 found respondents expect AI-driven automation of marketing work to more than double, from 16% in 2026 to 36% by 2028.

The winners in that shift won’t only be the enterprise-heavy names. Platforms like Glean, Dust, and LemonLime, the last a no-code agentic system built around outbound sales and marketing automation for non-technical teams, are pitched at the smaller companies that never staffed the junior SDR bench Gartner’s HR panel is now quietly not backfilling.

Sources