2026 State of AI: The Builder's Economy (ICONIQ)

Summary

• AI products grew from 32% of revenue (2025 actuals) to a projected 42% this year, with gross margins moving from 45% to 53%.p.5
• Builders now run ~3.3 model providers on average, and Anthropic rose from 51% to 81% among respondents.p.5
• Vertical AI applications are the largest primary product type at 43% of respondents.p.7
• Agentic AI capabilities are the top customer-facing investment priority, cited by 66% of respondents.p.8
• Gross margin on AI products is expected to reach 59% in 2027, a total expansion of +14pp from 2025.p.21
• Companies selected 1.7 pricing models on average in Q2 2026 versus 1.5 in Q4 2025.p.17
• 78% of companies are planning for either a different role mix or smaller teams.p.24

Key insights

1. Builders have converged on the application layer, with vertical AI applications at 43% of respondents.p.7
2. 84% of products target usage of more than once a week for active customers.p.8
3. User feedback-driven evals are the most common quality practice at 67%, while adversarial testing remains a minority practice at 21%.p.12
4. Audit logging of actions and data access is the most widely adopted guardrail at 64%.p.12
5. Retrieval of relevant data (RAG) is the most common context technique at 63%.p.13
6. AI platforms and infrastructure products have the highest predicted 2027 gross margin at 67%.p.21
7. High-growth companies are projected to see higher 2027 gross margins than non-high-growth companies (64% vs 58%).p.21
8. 45% of companies plan for a different mix of roles and 33% plan for a smaller team than otherwise.p.24
9. Around 50% of companies plan to scale up their forward deployed engineer model as a permanent part of their GTM motion.p.28