Business spending on artificial intelligence quintupled in a year to $177 billion, driven by agents

Menlo Park, California.— Enterprise spending on artificial intelligence reached $176.8 billion in 2026, more than five times the $33 billion of last year, according to venture capital firm Menlo Ventures' 2026 State of Enterprise AI report, published this Tuesday, November 3.

The jump, 5.4 times in one year, accelerated from the previous year's 3.9-fold growth. Yet the share of enterprises paying for AI rose only from 55% to 65%, indicating that growth comes mainly from heavier spending by current users rather than a wave of new buyers, the study says.

The driver of change is autonomous agents: on OpenRouter, a model-access platform, agents now generate 80% of tokens, roughly seven times human usage, and their consumption has grown 37-fold since overtaking human traffic in February, versus five-fold growth in human usage.

Enterprise AI applications totaled about $77 billion, up from $19 billion last year. Coding, at $34 billion, and AI assistants and productivity tools, at $25 billion, account for 76% of that spending. Healthcare remains the largest industry vertical, at $3.7 billion.

Concentration is also rising: Anthropic, OpenAI and Google together capture 69% of enterprise AI spending, up from 50% in 2025. Within spending on language-model interfaces, Anthropic extended its lead from 40% to 55%, OpenAI rose from 27% to 31% and Google fell from 21% to 9%, according to the report, based on a survey of nearly 400 decision-makers and a market analysis.

Menlo Ventures notes that companies budgeted nearly twice what they spent in 2025, but ended up spending 2.5 times what they had budgeted, a sign that demand is growing faster than forecasts.

Photo: Archivo A Lo Claro

Source: Menlo Ventures