Enterprise AI Investment Booms as Executives Seek Measurable ROI

AI Investment Booms as Executives Seek Measurable ROI">

Enterprise investment in AI is booming. Gartner is calling 2026 an "inflection year" for organizations to align their AI projects with strategic business objectives. As the pressure to prove ROI mounts, executives and technology leaders are looking to agentic AI to drive the measurable financial outcomes their businesses seek.

A prime opportunity for AI agents exists in the tech function, where IT infrastructure costs are projected to grow two to three times by 2030, even as budgets remain unchanged, according to McKinsey. And in the last 18 months, tech teams—the engineers, developers, architects, and other practitioners who are building, deploying, and continually improving their organizations’ infrastructure and applications—are clearly putting agents to work. The ultimate promise of agents is not only to automate tasks but to manage and coordinate entire workflows, pursuing business goals in a way that allows humans and agents to work together.

Given the risks involved in automated decision-making, teams cannot delegate the work that agents do without confidence that they are fully capable of performing the task and that it will do so in a safe, reliable, and secure manner. Among technology experts, research shows that teams are exceedingly confident about using agentic AI across a significant amount of AI, data, and cloud tasks. Where agent readiness drops is largely due to a lack of business context being supplied to agentic systems.

The more complex the task, the more reasoning capability an agent requires and the greater its need for business context. Such context-generation capabilities for agents are still at an early stage of development, especially in situations where enterprise data is difficult to wrangle and connect into the agent lifecycle at the speed and quality in which developers and executives need it. Human oversight is a key factor of success in deploying agentic AI.

Knowing that tech teams are in a pivotal position to lead this transformation, the experts interviewed expect agent confidence to accelerate as experience with agents deepens and business environments mature. "As we design agents to operate within the same operational boundaries, identity systems, and governance models that teams already use, they start to behave more like the systems organizations already trust," says Jeremy Winter, corporate vice president and chief product officer at Microsoft Azure Platform. This report, based on a survey of 300 global technology experts, ranks 101 tasks across AI, data, and cloud workflows based on respondents’ confidence in agents acting on their behalf.

It also examines how technology teams view the opportunities and challenges related to agentic AI, along with the potential for the technology to enhance their careers. Confidence in agents is surging for measurable tasks and growing in areas of complex judgment. Technology experts overwhelmingly believe agents help with everyday work including streamlining processes, improving performance, and reducing repetitive tasks.