Austin, Texas, USA, March 17, 2026
Enterprise buyers are moving from AI that assists to AI that acts. The data makes clear the shift is accelerating.
New findings from The Futurum Group’s “1H 2026 Enterprise Software Decision Maker Survey Report,” a study of 830 global IT decision-makers, reveal that Autonomous Agents and Agentic AI have surged to become the fastest-growing technology priority in the enterprise, climbing from 13.0% to 17.1% as a top-ranked priority, a 31.5% year-over-year increase. When combined with first- and second-place rankings, agentic AI reaches 39.3%, up from 32.0% in 2H 2025, signaling that agents are no longer a niche interest but a mainstream enterprise strategy.
Figure 1: Technology Priority Rankings, 1H 2026 vs. 2H 2025
“The pilot phase of enterprise AI is over. Buyers have moved past prompt-based copilots and are now demanding AI that can detect, decide, and execute tasks independently. Vendors that continue to lead with generative AI assistants risk being outpaced by competitors who can demonstrate truly autonomous agents operating across production workflows.”
— Keith Kirkpatrick, Vice President and Research Director, The Futurum Group
The survey reveals several key developments shaping the agentic AI landscape:
- Generative AI’s dominance is eroding: While GenAI remains the most frequently cited #1 technology priority at 32.8%, it declined 1.4 percentage points from 2H 2025, as buyers increasingly distinguish between AI that generates and AI that acts.
- Agentic deployment is targeting core business functions: Cybersecurity leads planned agentic AI deployment at 58.7%, followed by sales, marketing, and service (51.3%), and supply chain management (47.8%). These are production-grade deployments targeting core business operations, not experimentation.
- Data integration is losing priority: Data integration and application management fell 3.7 percentage points to 26.8%, as enterprises shift their focus from backend data plumbing to front-of-house AI capabilities that directly drive business outcomes.
Subscribers can read more in the full report — “1H 2026 Enterprise Software Decision Maker Survey Report” — on the Futurum Intelligence Platform. Non-subscribers click here for more information.
About Futurum Intelligence for Market Leaders
Futurum Intelligence’s Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows IQ service provides actionable insight from analysts, reports, and interactive visualization datasets, helping leaders drive their organizations through transformation and business growth. Subscribers can log into the platform at https://app.futurumgroup.com/, and non-subscribers can find additional information at Futurum Intelligence.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
