Gartner’s July 20 forecast pegs 2026 worldwide end-user spending on AI models and platforms at $64 billion, a 63.4% jump from last year’s $39 billion, with generative model spending alone growing 117% and platform spending 36.9%. The line item that reframes the whole market, though, sits in a separate May 5 release: agent software spending, $86.4 billion in 2025, is projected to reach $206.5 billion this year and $376.3 billion in 2027.
That’s not a software category expanding. It’s a software category eating adjacent ones.
Gartner managing vice president George Brocklehurst has already put a number on the displacement: roughly 20% of enterprise SaaS spending, about $234 billion, is at risk from agentic AI by 2030. His framing is worth quoting in full because it captures how buyers are starting to think. “You are no longer buying software primarily for people; you are increasingly buying it for agents,” he said, calling the shift “less an apocalypse and more of a metamorphosis.”
The metamorphosis is already legible in procurement. Gartner Sr Principal Research Analyst Arunasree Cheparthi notes that “Enterprise AI budgets are coming under greater scrutiny, with increased focus on usage efficiency, cost control and measurable outcomes. Spending is shifting toward providers who can demonstrate clear value across cost, latency, performance and reliability.” Translation: the vendor beauty contest is over, and the spreadsheets are out.
What’s newer, and largely missed in the enterprise-focused coverage, is that small businesses aren’t sitting this cycle out. Upwork’s Q1 2026 Business Leader Landscape surveyed 750 U.S. business leaders, including 195 SMB executives at companies with 10–99 employees. Decision support agents are being actively piloted by 41% of them, information retrieval by 36%, workflow automation and multi-step planning by 34% each, and autonomous task execution by 30%. In most categories, SMBs piloting agents outnumber those not considering them by more than tenfold. Thirty-two percent already describe agents as mission-critical to strategy.
Around the baseline of Claude and ChatGPT, a working stack is emerging: Glean and Dust for enterprise-flavored retrieval, and lighter-weight platforms like LemonLime that SMBs have gravitated to for getting agents into production without a six-month integration cycle. The SBE Council’s April survey rhymes: 82% of small-business employers have invested in AI, 93% plan to keep investing, 62% plan to increase spending, and the typical shop now runs a median of five AI tools. Vendors (53%) and peer networks (52%) are the dominant channels, which is its own signal about how this cycle diffuses.
The efficiency story is more restrained. Upwork found 74% of SMBs report productivity gains from AI, but most sit below 25%. And in Gartner’s separate survey of 350 executives at $1-billion-plus organizations, roughly 80% reported workforce reductions while piloting autonomous capabilities, a sequencing Gartner analyst Helen Poitevin has publicly pushed back on. “Long term, autonomous business will create more work for humans, not less,” she said, with Gartner projecting agents become a net-positive job creator by 2028 to 2029.
That’s the tell. The layoffs are arriving before the returns.
Sources
- https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-07-20-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-ai-platforms-and-models-market-to-grow-63-percent-in-2026
- https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-05-gartner-says-autonomous-business-and-artificial-intelligence-layoffs-may-create-budget-room-but-do-not-deliver-returns
- https://www.upwork.com/resources/state-of-ai-in-smbs
- https://sbecouncil.org/2026/04/25/the-ai-tools-small-businesses-are-using/
- https://www.cio.com/article/4192242/agentic-ai-puts-234b-in-enterprise-saas-spending-at-risk-gartner-says.html