Nathaniel Whittemore

Now moving out to a more longitudinal view, we have KPMG's most recent quarterly pulse survey.

This data comes from a set of executives from companies primarily with more than a billion dollars in revenue and is their recurring tracker so we get some amount of quarter-over-quarter data.

Couple of big things stand out.

Despite ROI still being hard to quantify in really clear ways, the average anticipated spend on AI just continues to go up.

In Q1 of last year, organizations reported to KPMG that they anticipated spending about $114 million on average over the next 12 months.

That has now jumped to $207 million.

And part of the reason might be that agents are now, to put it bluntly, very real.

In Q1 of 2025, only 11% of organizations had agents in deployment.

Many more were experimenting or piloting, but that was the number where agents were in full production.

In Q2, that jumped meaningfully to 33%.

And yet in Q1 of this year, that number is now over 50% for the first time at 54%.

Within that 54%, 40% are scaling or deploying, 6% are developing multi-agent systems, and 9% are orchestrating.

Piloting is down to 30%, and experimenting is down to 14%.

And in many ways, this agentic adoption kind of defines everything else on the survey.

A lot of the considerations are around how to manage new risk from agents.

Cyber and employee misuse is up from 32% to 44% when asked about the most difficult society-wide challenge with AI between now and 2030.

It's also coloring challenges around employees.

While 55% of organizations are seeing slight or significant employee adoption of agents, i.e.

employees beginning to accept and integrate agents into their work, they're also finding resistance.

Interestingly, the resistance appears to be more about skills gaps than concerns about job security, although both rate very highly at 76% and 71% respectively.