3 surveys deliver the same uncomfortable truth about adopting agentic AI

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In 2025, agentic AI was still mostly a promise. Today, it's a stress test for all companies across all industries.

The results of three separate research studies -- from Deloitte, KMPG PwC, and Accenture -- all point to the same uncomfortable truth: Companies are moving fast on adoption and much slower on the harder work of actually rebuilding how they operate with humans and agents as part of their labor force.

Deloitte's Agentic Transformation survey found that while 43% of organizations are now expanding AI agent deployments across functions, only 15% have reached scaled, orchestrated multi-agent deployments. Workforce readiness sat at just 20%, and only 16% of businesses said their current processes were actually prepared for agentic adoption. That's a big difference from where leaders think they're headed. Deloitte's report found that 74% of leaders expect half of business processes to be redesigned around AI agents by 2030.

Also: Businesses must reinvent their processes and workforce to scale agentic AI adoption

New research from two other major firms that are guiding large-scale implementations of AI agents fills the picture, and the consensus is remarkably consistent: adoption of AI agents is real, but production-grade, value-generating deployments are still rare.

That said, research from Salesforce shows that the number of active AI agents in organizations has tripled over the last year, and that AI agents have improved their capabilities by 350%, enabling them to handle complex tasks. More interestingly, employee use of AI agents has also increased threefold as trust deepens. The research found that the average number of agents per organization nearly tripled (from 5 to 13), while creation time dropped by 53%, to an average of 1.9 days per agent.

KPMG's Global AI Pulse , based on a survey of 2,145 C-suite and business leaders across 20 countries, shows organizations moving from experimentation toward broader deployment of AI agents. But the center of gravity is shifting from deployment to accountability, AI economics, and value. The shift is due to the fact that the return on investment from AI agent adoption remains limited even as adoption climbs.

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

KPMG's report found that 76% of businesses now see real business value from AI, a 12% increase in one quarter. In addition, 78% of business leaders are confident they can future-proof their AI strategy, up 8% since Q1 2026. Seventy-one percent of organizations say they are making good progress toward a fully integrated AI-human workforce, up 11% in one quarter. Organizations with full visibility into AI operating costs are five times more likely to report established ROI than those without such visibility.