AGI Delayed: Navigating the Ongoing AI Disruption and Its Impact on Business

A team of researchers from the AI Futures Project, who in early 2025 predicted that artificial general intelligence (AGI) would surpass human cognitive performance by 2027, now revises their forecast. The new estimate places the arrival of AGI between 2029 and 2032, as the pace of technological progress and institutional readiness diverge.

Revisiting the Prophesied AGI Moment

The AI 2027 report, published in 2025, outlined a five-year path to AGI, with explicit metrics to track advancements. The authors characterized 2025 and 2026 as foundational years, marked by the emergence of AI agents that would propel advancements in computational power and model capabilities. In a self-assessment released in February 2026, the authors estimated that progress toward AGI had reached roughly two-thirds of their expected pace, leading to the revised timeline.

AI Agents: A Mixed Bag of Success

While the commercial rollout of AI agents has been lackluster, research and coding capabilities have made significant strides. In 2025, Perplexity and OpenAI launched their agentic browsers, but both struggled to gain traction. Walmart's partnership with OpenAI for Instant Checkout also produced underwhelming results. However, Walmart found success with its in-app chatbot, Sparky, which has seen engagement from half of all app users, with average order values 35 percent higher than non-users.

Industry Context and Implications

The lesson from these mixed results is clear: AI agents succeed when embedded in existing trusted contexts, not when they require users to adopt new ones. For enterprise leaders, the disruption caused by AI is already underway, and the gap between the current state of AI and the institutional capacity to absorb it is widening. Even if all AI progress were to stop today, the effects of what has already been deployed would take more than a decade to fully work through institutions, labor markets, and organizational structures.

Forward-Looking Industry Impact

As the AI industry continues to evolve, businesses must adapt to the ongoing disruption. The self-improving loop, where coding agents accelerate research, which in turn accelerates next-generation models, is now structurally visible. Boris Cherny, head of Anthropic’s Claude Code, stated that 'pretty much 100% of the company’s code is now AI-generated.' This trend is likely to continue, driving further advancements and reshaping the business landscape.

References

• Revisiting the AGI Timeline: The Disruption That’s Already Here and What Comes Next