The 2026 Stanford AI Index Report documents accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence across enterprise functions, with 88 percent of organizations now using AI in at least one core business area, up from 72 percent in 2024, according to the annual benchmark compiled by Stanford University.
Marketing and sales rank among the top deployment areas for enterprise AI, with 87 percent of marketers reporting they use generative AI in at least one workflow in 2026, more than doubling the 51 percent recorded in 2024. The rapid expansion reflects both increasing tool availability and growing organizational pressure to deploy AI for competitive advantage.
The Stanford AI Index tracks AI capabilities, investment, research output, and real-world adoption using data from industry surveys, academic publications, and economic indicators. The 2026 edition highlights sharp AI adoption gains in knowledge work, including content creation, research assistance, and decision support.
Separate tracking from the report shows AI model capabilities improving across coding, reasoning, and language tasks, while enterprise deployment of agentic AI systems is emerging as a new trend. Approximately 34 percent of enterprise marketing teams report running at least one autonomous AI agent in production, more than double the 14 percent from the prior year.
Source: Stanford HAI AI Index -- https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/