2026: The State of Enterprise AI (Menlo Ventures)

Summary

• Enterprise AI deployment spend scaled to $177B by September 2026, up from $33B last year.p.1
• Frontier labs command 69% of deployment dollars (vs. 50% last year); Anthropic's share of enterprise API spend rose from 40% to 55%, OpenAI's from 27% to 31%, while Google's fell from 21% to 9%.p.1
• Coding ($34.0B) and chatbots ($25.0B) make up 76% of the $77.3B application market.p.1
• 55% of AI dollars is net new spend rather than existing software or labor budgets.p.1
• Enterprises spend about $1.70 putting AI to work for every $1 the industry spends building models: $176.8B on using AI versus $102.5B on building.p.7
• Agents now account for 80% of all tokens on OpenRouter, at 130.9 trillion per week.p.3
• Open-source models' share of tokens rose from 11% to 19% while their share of spending fell from 6% to 4%.p.9

Key insights

1. Reported enterprise AI spending averaged 4.7x last year's level against a planned 1.9x.p.5
2. Chinese models grew to 89% of open-source spend, led by Kimi (61%), DeepSeek (15%), GLM (11%) and Qwen (3%).p.10
3. Post-training adoption among AI builders rose from 6% in 2025 to 10% in 2026.p.11
4. Customer success AI spend grew 4.3x to $2.7B, while HR grew 2.5x to $0.9B and marketing 1.8x to $1.2B.p.12
5. Healthcare is the largest vertical AI category at $3.7B (up 2.5x), or 37% of vertical spend.p.15
6. AI-native providers capture 77% of application-layer spend and 90% of infrastructure-layer spend, up from 63% and 44% last year.p.16
7. 74% of builders use agents to manage workflows, compared with 27% of startup deployments in 2025.p.17
8. Code sandboxes rose from 11% to 40% of builders, search from 5% to 30%, and browser infrastructure from 4% to 14%.p.18
9. Frontier models' share of enterprise AI spending rose from 35% to 63%, while token share climbed from 18% to 42%.p.9