What 1,000+ Executives Told Us About AI Agents
episodePreviously titled “What 1,000+ Execs Told Us About AI Agents” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, what more than a thousand executives told us about AI agents. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
We're sold out for 2025 and about halfway through the beginning of 2026. Send us a note and we can get you all the information you need. Now with that, we turn to today's topic. And since this is a long read slash big think type of weekend episode, even longer for many of you in the US, I thought it would be fun to go beyond the headlines and actually dig into the data around what we are hearing about AI and agents in the enterprise based on our conversations with thousands of executives. Now, the context for this, for those of you who don't know, is my startup Superintelligent. Superintelligent is effectively an AI business intelligence startup that focuses on AI and agent planning in the enterprise.
We use voice agents to totally transform the process of discovery, opportunity mapping, and figuring out what AI and agent opportunities are most pertinent for your organization and what you're going to need to do to get ready to take advantage of them. Over the last six months, we have done thousands and thousands of these interviews, and this analysis represents a subsection of what we've learned. We're going to talk about the most common challenges we see, what the biggest blockers are, as well as some of the interesting opportunities and what the biggest enablers are. Hopefully, this is the type of presentation that can be extremely practical and useful for those of you who are inside businesses figuring out how to harness AI and agents.
And to kick us off, let me give you a few grounding statistics. As part of this opportunity mapping, we curate what we call an agent readiness score. It's on a scale of 100, and it's divided into quartiles, with the bottom quartile being called agent initiate, the next quartile being called agent explorer, the third quartile being agent pilot, and the fourth being agent ready. Now, there's no shame in any of these quartiles. They simply reflect different levels of preparation and organizational development when it comes to AI and agents more specifically. Overall, the average readiness score was 52.1, which is in that agent pilot category. And 58% of all the organizations we work with are at the low end of that agent pilot category.
This means pretty much exactly what you think it would mean. There are probably some AI pilots and AI infrastructure there, but it's not necessarily super robust. Maybe there's been some dabbling even with agents, but not necessarily a lot of full-scale deployments. There are probably lingering issues around either governance or data or something else. But there is also a foundation to be built upon. That's the agent pilot stage. Explorer, which represented 39% of organizations, is a step back from that. Maybe there's even less infrastructure ready and even fewer pilots going on, but we're still not at a null state. Initiate is really on that low end and Reforster organizations that are just getting up and running when it comes to anything AI and agents.
Again, no shame in that game. There are plenty of organizations that fit in that mold. One other interesting overview is that on average, we find that big organizations are a little bit farther along than small organizations. Now you might think that this would be the opposite, given that smaller organizations feel like they are better able to dynamically adapt, but it turns out this is hard for everyone, and large organizations have just had a mandate from on high to get out ahead of this compared to others. When it comes to the top use cases... Once again, I don't think that if you are a regular listener here or if you spend any time on these issues inside your company, it will seem super surprising.
At the very top is enterprise knowledge search. That came up as a recommendation in 48% of our audits. There's just a ton of information locked inside corporations that, if it were more easily accessible, would help people inside those organizations do their job better.
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