The trend is unequivocal: artificial intelligence is ceasing to be seen as a tool and is becoming central infrastructure for business operations. By 2025, approximately 88% of organizations will already be using AI in at least one business function, with many expanding use cases and exploring intelligent agents beyond pilot projects. Renowned consultancies indicate that this transition to deeper uses will continue to accelerate throughout 2026 and 2027 as the capabilities of AI agents become incorporated into the core of the business.
Three main trends explain this shift. The first is the arrival of multimodal models that understand and generate text, images, audio, and other data formats in an integrated way, which greatly expands the scope of possible applications and makes interactions with systems more natural and powerful. Gartner itself estimates that 40% of enterprise applications will have AI agents focused on specific tasks by 2026, a significant leap compared to virtually no use in 2025.
Meanwhile, agent systems are consolidating as the new operational layer for companies. Today, a significant portion of organizations are experimenting with or deploying AI agents capable of executing complete workflows, such as integrating data between systems, filling out forms, compiling reports, and triggering automated processes across different parts of the operation. Recent research shows that 62% of organizations are experimenting with AI agents, and approximately 23% are already expanding these solutions within their corporate operations.
This movement toward intelligent automation is growing at an accelerated pace and is expected to integrate natively into enterprise software by 2026.
This advancement creates a new logic of operational abundance, in which historical bottlenecks in customer service, data analysis, supply chain management, and technical support begin to be eliminated or drastically reduced. Industry reports indicate that organizations that incorporate AI agents into their core processes observe significant gains in efficiency and productivity.
At the same time, the shift from isolated AI projects to infrastructure implies redesigning processes, new governance models, and reconfiguring internal roles.
Therefore, 2026 is shaping up to be a turning point where AI ceases to be perceived as an accessory functionality and begins to function as a strategic business infrastructure. Companies that have already internalized this change are redesigning workflows, revising management structures, and gaining a competitive advantage from this reorganization. In this new scenario, the market differentiator is no longer simply "using AI" but rather reshaping the operating model itself around artificial intelligence capabilities—a distinction that should separate those advancing at the pace required by the next decade from those still treating AI as an isolated experiment.
*Felipe Giannetti, former partner at StartSe and executive responsible for leading the expansion of StackAI, a US startup specializing in corporate automation with artificial intelligence (AI), to Texas (USA) and Brazil.
