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More Than Half of Companies Have Deployed AI Agents

More than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents, according to the PagerDuty Agentic AI Survey.

Agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate faster than generative AI (GenAI) while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries. Companies are no longer just experimenting. The survey data shows that 94% of companies believe they will adopt agentic AI more quickly than GenAI, with 55% strongly agreeing that they will integrate it across their organizations at an accelerated pace. As businesses look to automate complex workflows and drive efficiency, agentic AI is emerging as the next phase of AI-driven transformation, offering faster deployment and deeper operational impact.

Image
Pagerduty

Key findings include:

Confidence in GenAI

The majority of respondents (63%) have fully integrated GenAI into their company. 73% of organizations in the UK and 69% in Australia lead the charge with 64% in the US not far behind. However, traction in Japan shows to be noticeably slower as only 44% of companies have fully integrated GenAI.

AI Maturity and Adoption

71% of companies that have fully implemented GenAI are far more likely to have already deployed agentic AI, compared to just 19% of companies that have yet to fully implement GenAI.

Strong Return on Investment (ROI) Expectations

62% of companies expect more than 100% ROI from agentic AI, with an average expected return of 171% on their investment. GenAI has already delivered strong financial results, with an average ROI of 152%.

Automating Workflows at Scale

52%, more than half, of companies expect agentic AI to automate or accelerate between 26% and 50% of their workloads, unlocking significant operational efficiencies.

Future Impact of AI

44% of business leaders expect agentic AI to have a greater overall impact than GenAI, while 40% believe the latter will prove more transformative, demonstrating that companies are divided on whether agentic AI will cause an industry shift similar to GenAI.

Lessons from GenAI Implementation

44% of business leaders cite rushed AI adoption without proper planning as the biggest challenge, which is one of the mistakes leaders hope to avoid repeating from their GenAI deployment. Cost control (40%), improved employee training (37%), and stronger data infrastructure (37%) were also among the top priorities for AI strategy refinement.

AI Investment Is Scaling Up

75% of organizations are investing $1 million or more in AI initiatives, reflecting a commitment to long-term AI-driven transformation, showcasing ongoing interest in AI implementation leading to increasing budget allocations.

"Leaders need to provide tangible, quantifiable benefits from their AI deployments if they want to justify the investment," said Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty. "PagerDuty's latest survey data illustrates how strongly organizations believe agentic AI will help unlock real value from AI and automation, as 62% of survey respondents anticipate triple-digit ROI. Companies that successfully integrate agentic AI into their operations can expect increased efficiency gains by automating complexity and accelerating decision-making."

Many organizations learned firsthand that insufficient training hindered GenAI adoption and are taking a different approach with agentic AI. Every company surveyed has various plans to implement agentic AI training, with 61% prioritizing organization-wide seminars or structured initiatives.

Additionally, 56% of organizations will offer an external course to their employees, while 52% plan to host official office hours and formal internal mentorship programs to ensure employees can effectively integrate and leverage AI agents in their workflows.

Methodology: The survey of 1,000 IT and business executives across the US, UK, Australia, and Japan was conducted by Wakefield Research.

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Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

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In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

More Than Half of Companies Have Deployed AI Agents

More than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents, according to the PagerDuty Agentic AI Survey.

Agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate faster than generative AI (GenAI) while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries. Companies are no longer just experimenting. The survey data shows that 94% of companies believe they will adopt agentic AI more quickly than GenAI, with 55% strongly agreeing that they will integrate it across their organizations at an accelerated pace. As businesses look to automate complex workflows and drive efficiency, agentic AI is emerging as the next phase of AI-driven transformation, offering faster deployment and deeper operational impact.

Image
Pagerduty

Key findings include:

Confidence in GenAI

The majority of respondents (63%) have fully integrated GenAI into their company. 73% of organizations in the UK and 69% in Australia lead the charge with 64% in the US not far behind. However, traction in Japan shows to be noticeably slower as only 44% of companies have fully integrated GenAI.

AI Maturity and Adoption

71% of companies that have fully implemented GenAI are far more likely to have already deployed agentic AI, compared to just 19% of companies that have yet to fully implement GenAI.

Strong Return on Investment (ROI) Expectations

62% of companies expect more than 100% ROI from agentic AI, with an average expected return of 171% on their investment. GenAI has already delivered strong financial results, with an average ROI of 152%.

Automating Workflows at Scale

52%, more than half, of companies expect agentic AI to automate or accelerate between 26% and 50% of their workloads, unlocking significant operational efficiencies.

Future Impact of AI

44% of business leaders expect agentic AI to have a greater overall impact than GenAI, while 40% believe the latter will prove more transformative, demonstrating that companies are divided on whether agentic AI will cause an industry shift similar to GenAI.

Lessons from GenAI Implementation

44% of business leaders cite rushed AI adoption without proper planning as the biggest challenge, which is one of the mistakes leaders hope to avoid repeating from their GenAI deployment. Cost control (40%), improved employee training (37%), and stronger data infrastructure (37%) were also among the top priorities for AI strategy refinement.

AI Investment Is Scaling Up

75% of organizations are investing $1 million or more in AI initiatives, reflecting a commitment to long-term AI-driven transformation, showcasing ongoing interest in AI implementation leading to increasing budget allocations.

"Leaders need to provide tangible, quantifiable benefits from their AI deployments if they want to justify the investment," said Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty. "PagerDuty's latest survey data illustrates how strongly organizations believe agentic AI will help unlock real value from AI and automation, as 62% of survey respondents anticipate triple-digit ROI. Companies that successfully integrate agentic AI into their operations can expect increased efficiency gains by automating complexity and accelerating decision-making."

Many organizations learned firsthand that insufficient training hindered GenAI adoption and are taking a different approach with agentic AI. Every company surveyed has various plans to implement agentic AI training, with 61% prioritizing organization-wide seminars or structured initiatives.

Additionally, 56% of organizations will offer an external course to their employees, while 52% plan to host official office hours and formal internal mentorship programs to ensure employees can effectively integrate and leverage AI agents in their workflows.

Methodology: The survey of 1,000 IT and business executives across the US, UK, Australia, and Japan was conducted by Wakefield Research.

Hot Topics

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.