The State of Agentic AI
We asked CTOs, CIOs, and heads of engineering across fintech, healthcare, commerce, media, and enterprise SaaS one set of plain questions. Where is your team right now? What is the hardest part? What didn't work? 72% are already shipping, scaling, or governing AI in production. Their answers map where the real work is in 2026.
Get the report
Enter your details and the report downloads immediately.
What's inside
Five themes, grounded in the numbers, plus the open-ended answers in respondents' own words.
Why reliability, not capability, has become the bottleneck, and what it takes to trust an output enough to ship it.
How cost moved from afterthought to design constraint, and why unsupervised agents burn more tokens than human-in-the-loop workflows.
Where the demo-to-production wall actually lives, and the capability gap teams underestimate most.
Why governance keeps falling behind deployment, and what enforceable guardrails actually look like.
How roles are shifting as humans move from producing output to reviewing and approving it.
Plus a foreword from Debbie Madden and a candid "In their own words" section on what didn't work.
By the numbers
The full breakdowns, the other findings, and the verbatim answers are in the report.
The hard part is no longer getting AI to do something impressive in a demo. The hard part is trusting it in production, paying for it, governing it, and getting your people to actually use it. Reliability, not capability, is the bottleneck.
Move from experiment to production-ready AI
Stride is an Anthropic Claude Partner. We help technology teams ship dependable AI through fixed-scope engagements: build for you, build alongside you, or teach your team. 95+ clients. 350 engagements. 40+ agentic AI deployments.
Talk to Stride