Inside the Shift to Agentic Intelligence and How Enterprises Can Lead in 2026

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are reshaping the enterprise in real time. We are seeing foundational changes that redefine how businesses operate, how software is engineered, and how humans engage with technology. The progress we witness today is setting the stage for a future where AI is not just a tool, but an active collaborator. By 2026, these shifts will push us firmly into an era of dynamic, interactive, and intelligent systems.

AI is moving fast, with each year bringing immense improvements to the underlying technology and equally immense opportunities to shift how enterprises operate. The story of this transformation is not one of isolated advancements. Instead, it’s a narrative of interconnected change, where each new capability builds upon the last and expands how organizations can apply AI.

This article offers three predictions for the further evolution of AI agents, all building upon each other and culminating in a new, collaborative relationship between people and machines.

Prediction #1: Agents will advance from simple chat interactions to true collaborative work

The current experience with many AI systems, like common chatbots, has given way to something far more dynamic: agentic AI. The one-way street of human prompts and AI responses, while positioned as a conversation, is more akin to natural language search. You ask, the chatbot answers.

Now, AI agents are taking on actions to expand those conversations into autonomous actions. For example, agentic commerce offerings from OpenAI, Amazon, and others will find the best product and let shoppers buy it instantly without leaving the chat.

As we get further into 2026, agentic AI will begin functioning as real-time intelligence software that can generate interfaces, adjust workflows, and create structured, context-aware logic on the fly — and far beyond simple B2C applications.

Imagine describing a business need in plain language: Show me the top-performing product lines based on volume sold and total profit for the last three quarters. Instead of navigating rigid systems, finding the correct databases and tables, and writing SQL queries to fulfill it, an AI agent will instantly build the tools and pathways required to complete the task — including governance to ensure access rules are followed, and sensitive data is masked. The requester then gets a graphic view of the data along with a plain-language summary.

This marks the next stage of agentic AI: software that interprets intent and immediately generates the mechanisms needed to achieve it. And these agentic systems will provide tools and guardrails to ensure governance, oversight, explainability, and auditability — all critical in an enterprise context, especially as agentic solutions are scaled into more areas of the business. The most effective deployments will combine powerful agentic capabilities that benefit workers along with clear, transparent controls that make trust an essential part of the equation.

This leap in agentic intelligence creates the foundation for the next major shift: handing over entire complex workflows to AI.

Prediction #2: Enterprises will hand complete software development workflows to autonomous agents

With AI agents capable of understanding intent and building solutions, it’s natural that they will first take on highly structured, pattern-based work. In 2026, software development is poised to become the first major enterprise workflow performed primarily by AI agents — its foundation is already a $7.4 billion market and expected to grow 27% annually through 2030.

The mechanical layers of engineering are ideal for agentic automation. Tasks like scaffolding applications, wiring integrations, stitching APIs, creating test harnesses, and generating initial documentation all follow recognizable patterns.

Agents can execute these with a level of speed and precision that is difficult for humans to match. This will not make developers obsolete. On the contrary, it elevates their role. Developers will continue to lead on architecture, creativity, and higher-order problem-solving. However, the repetitive and time-consuming components of engineering will shift to agents.

As this transition accelerates, developers could see agents taking on up to 90% of coding and related manual tasks (think documentation, upgrades, bug fixing, etc.), allowing them to focus on innovation, while agents handle the execution.

AI will not simply assist development; it will perform it. This new operational model naturally leads to a more interactive and collaborative partnership.

Prediction #3: As AI hype fades away, ROI becomes the talk of the boardroom

AI startups captured half of all global technology funding in 2025 — more than $202 billion. That’s a 75% increase over 2024 funding, and a critical driver of overall AI hype (and accompanying predictions of the inevitable bursting bubble). However, that number pales in comparison to the $1.5 trillion companies spent globally on AI last year — a 50% increase over 2024 spending. In that same report, Gartner predicts a further 37% increase in spending in 2026.

What’s the impact of all that investment? Your board wants to know, too!

Nearly two-thirds of CEOs say they’re under more pressure to show returns on their AI investments. Yet, while typical technology investments have an expected payback of less than a year, according to Deloitte, most organizations (66%) need two to four years to realize a return on AI investments.

The pressure to deliver faster ROI will compel executives in 2026 to scale AI pilots and experiments into more areas of the business and drive needle-moving productivity, experience, cost savings, speed, and other gains in every corner of the enterprise. Internal teams will also focus less on “transforming the business” and more on tactical moves to automate specific mission-critical processes to show fast quantitative results. Ironically, this will require greater AI investment to orchestrate task-level automations and enable autonomous, AI-driven decision-making, helping automate more and more complex end-to-end processes.

Executives will also need to invest in upskilling so workers can more effectively build and collaborate with AI agents. A key shift in 2025 was from AI replacing workers to AI augmenting workers. Studies even show that companies are growing their workforces to support AI adoption and enable the development of more complex offerings. However, only organizations that prepare workers for AI will see ROIs accelerate.

Entering the age of collaborative intelligence

The journey from smarter agents to AI-driven development and proactive collaboration is a single, powerful narrative. One trend enables the next, creating a cycle of innovation that will fundamentally change the enterprise. As these shifts take hold, the role of AI will expand from supportive to truly collaborative.

Agentic systems will not only accelerate work, but will begin to participate in it, driving new levels of speed, quality, and innovation. This is not a distant vision but an approaching reality. The companies that invest early and thoughtfully in these interconnected capabilities will be the ones that define what enterprise performance looks like in 2026 and beyond.