AI agent statistics 2026: adoption, use cases and trust

How many developers use AI and agents

• 84% of developers use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76% the year before. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 47.1% of developers use AI tools daily; among professional developers it's 50.6%. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 17.7% use AI tools weekly and 13.7% monthly or less. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 16.2% of developers don't use AI tools and don't plan to. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 14.1% of developers use AI agents at work daily, 9% weekly and 7.8% monthly or less. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 37.9% of developers don't use AI agents and don't plan to. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• Among professional developers, 14.9% use AI agents daily. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 72.2% of developers said they don't do vibe coding; 11.9% said they do. (Stack Overflow, 2025)

Which agent tools developers use

• 81.7% of developers using out-of-the-box agent tools use ChatGPT. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 67.9% use GitHub Copilot and 47.4% Google Gemini. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 40.8% use Claude Code and 31.3% Microsoft Copilot. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• For agent orchestration, 51.1% use Ollama, 32.9% LangChain and 16.2% LangGraph. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• For agent data storage, 42.9% use Redis and 42.8% the GitHub MCP Server. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 83.5% of developers who use agents at work use them for software engineering. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• For agent observability, 43% of developers use Grafana with Prometheus and 31.8% Sentry. (Stack Overflow, 2025)

Productivity and trust

• 16.3% of developers say AI agents improved their productivity to a great extent; 35.3% say somewhat. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• About 70% agree AI agents have reduced the time spent on specific development tasks. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• About 87% are concerned about the accuracy of information provided by AI agents. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• About 81% have security and privacy concerns about AI agents. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• Only 3.1% of developers highly trust the accuracy of AI tools; 29.6% somewhat trust them. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 19.6% of developers highly distrust AI tool accuracy. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 66% cite AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite, as their top frustration. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 45.2% say debugging AI-generated code is more time-consuming. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 75.3% would still ask a person for help when they don't trust AI's answers. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 59.7% of developers view AI tools favourably (22.9% very favourable, 36.8% favourable). (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• About 17% agree AI agents improved collaboration within their team. (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• Writing code is the task most often partially handled by AI (59%); searching for answers is most often mostly handled by AI (54.1%). (Stack Overflow, 2025)
• 75.8% of developers don't plan to use AI for deployment and monitoring. (Stack Overflow, 2025)

Agents in production

• 51% of over 1,300 professionals surveyed use AI agents in production. (LangChain, 2024)
• 63% of mid-sized companies (100 to 2,000 employees) have agents in production. (LangChain, 2024)
• 78% have active plans to put agents into production soon. (LangChain, 2024)
• 90% of respondents from non-tech companies have or plan to deploy agents. (LangChain, 2024)
• Research and summarisation is the top agent use case (58%), followed by personal productivity (53.5%) and customer service (45.8%). (LangChain, 2024)
• Performance quality is the top concern, cited by 45.8% of small companies against 22.4% citing cost. (LangChain, 2024)
• 39.8% of teams use offline evaluation of agents, against 32.5% using online evaluation. (LangChain, 2024)
• 51% of tech companies use two or more methods to control agents, against 39% in other sectors. (LangChain, 2024)

Forecasts

• Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to costs, unclear value or weak risk controls. (Gartner, June 2025)
• Gartner forecasts 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, up from less than 1% in 2024. (Gartner, June 2025)
• Gartner expects at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously by agentic AI by 2028. (Gartner, June 2025)
• Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real. (Gartner, June 2025)
• Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise apps will feature task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. (Gartner, August 2025)
• Gartner predicts 70% of enterprises will abandon agentic AI built by vendors' forward-deployed engineers by 2028. (Gartner, September 2026)
• Gartner predicts 60% of brands will use agentic AI to deliver one-to-one customer interactions by 2028. (Gartner, January 2026)

Agents on real web forms (our data)

What our submission agent met when it walked the submit flows of 352 startup directories in a real browser. Detail in our submission form statistics.

Source: AgentLaunch: submit flows recorded by our agent on {{n}} directories, September 2026.

• Our agent completed the submit flow to a final screen on 56% of 352 directories without a person.
• 56 flows (16%) showed a CAPTCHA, the most common reason an agent has to hand over.
• 35 used Cloudflare Turnstile, 21 reCAPTCHA and 3 hCaptcha.
• 88 flows needed an account and 12 sent an email verification code.
• 28 flows ended at a payment page, a step that should always wait for a person's approval.
• 41 flows ended at a qualification check, such as a badge or eligibility rule.
• 55% of top-five Product Hunt launches in our 30-day sample mentioned AI or agents in their tagline. (AgentLaunch analysis of Product Hunt, October 2026)
• Several launch platforms now publish llms.txt files written for AI agents that submit products on a user's behalf.