Business adoption of AI agents tripled this year - as measurable ROI emerges

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.

ZDNET's key takeaways

• The number of active AI agents in organizations has tripled in the last year. 
• AI agents have improved their capabilities by 350% and can now handle complex tasks. 
• Employee use of AI agents has increased 3X as trust deepens. 

The average number of AI agents activated per organization increased nearly threefold since 2025, according to the 2026 Agentic Enterprise Index, new research from Salesforce that analyzes aggregate AI usage data from the company's Agentforce platform.

The index analyzes the activity of AI engagements in production for five consecutive quarters of 400 real businesses leverage AI agents to drive ROI. In addition, the index report includes a survey of nearly 5,000 respondents across nine key markets. 

Also: 'Specialists aren't required' anymore: How to stay valuable in an AI agent workplace today

The biggest takeaways from the Agentic Enterprise Index report are:

• The scale of agentic AI adoption is accelerating, fast. The average number of agents per organization nearly tripled (going from 5 to 13), while creation time dropped by 53% to an average of 1.9 days to create an agent. 
• People are starting to trust agents -- a lot. Since Feb. 2025, there's been a threefold surge in employees' weekly number of initiated agent sessions.
• Industries are finding the strategies that work best for their business needs: Consumer-facing industries like retail and travel lead in the speed of deployment and the use of agents overall, especially during peak-demand seasons like the holidays. Regulated industries have been slower to adopt and implement agents, and their percent of  Agentic Work Units (AWUs) -- a term defined by Salesforce that represents one discrete unit of work completed by an AI agent -- in the last year is lower, but the agents themselves are often much more sophisticated.