Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence is set to reach about $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47 percent increase over the prior year, according to a Gartner forecast. The projection captures the scale of investment flowing into AI hardware, software, and services as organizations move from pilots to production deployments.

AI software is one of the fastest-expanding pieces of that total, forecast at $452.5 billion in 2026, up roughly 60 percent year over year. Within software, agentic AI stands out as the quickest-growing category. Gartner projects agentic AI spending of $201.9 billion in 2026, a 141 percent jump, with purpose-built AI agent software reaching about $206.5 billion, an increase near 139 percent in a single year.

Adoption inside business applications is accelerating in step with the spending. Gartner expects 40 percent of enterprise applications to include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5 percent a year earlier. That shift places autonomous agents at the center of how software vendors are redesigning their products.

The longer-term outlook is equally striking. In a best-case scenario, Gartner projects that agentic AI could drive roughly 30 percent of enterprise application software revenue by 2035, surpassing $450 billion, up from about 2 percent in 2025. The figures frame agentic AI as the dominant force reshaping enterprise software budgets over the next decade.

Source: Gartner -- https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-ai-spending-to-grow-47-percent-in-2026