Welcome executives and professionals. Enterprise problems present the hardest technical challenges for frontier intelligence, requiring reliability, safety, and security at scale.

Since the previous edition, we have reviewed hundreds of the latest insights in agentic and generative AI, spanning best practices, case studies, market dynamics, and innovations.

This briefing outlines what is driving material value — and why it’s important.

In today’s briefing:

• OpenAI’s state of enterprise AI 2025.

• Anthropic: AI agents in production.

• The state of generative AI tech 2025.

• BCG: Improving AI adoption quality.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

MARKET INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

OpenAI’s state of enterprise AI 2025

Brief: OpenAI published a 24-page report on enterprise AI adoption. The analysis combines real-world usage data from OpenAI’s enterprise customers with survey responses from 9,000 professionals.

Breakdown:

• Over the past year weekly messages in ChatGPT Enterprise increased roughly 8x, and the average worker is sending 30% more messages.

• Average reasoning token consumption per firm rose ~320x in the past 12 months, indicating deeper integration of advanced intelligence.

• 75% of workers say AI improves speed or quality of work, saving 40–60 minutes daily on average; heavy users save over 10 hours weekly.

• AI is enabling entirely new work, not just faster execution. 74% of users report completing tasks they previously could not perform at work.

• Case studies from Moderna, Lowe’s, and others show AI driving revenue growth, better customer experiences, and faster development cycles.

Why it’s important: With more than 1 million business customers now using OpenAI, the picture is clear: enterprise AI adoption is accelerating not just in breadth, but in depth. It is reshaping how people work, how teams collaborate, and how organizations build and deliver products.

MARKET INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

Anthropic: AI agents in production

Brief: Anthropic published a 48-page report drawing on a survey of over 500 US technical leaders to understand how enterprises are deploying AI agents in production, and where they see opportunities in 2026.

Breakdown:

• AI agents that reason through problems, make decisions, and act autonomously have moved from experimentation into production.

• 57% of firms now deploy agents for multi-stage workflows, including 16% that have progressed to processes spanning multiple teams.

• Given the growth of agentic coding, it's unsurprising that nearly 90% of organizations surveyed use AI to assist with coding.

• Further high-impact use cases include data analysis and report generation (60%) with 56% planning agent-led research.

• The report features production case studies from healthcare, retail, tech, and financial services, including Novo Nordisk and L’Oréal.

Why it’s important: Eight in 10 organizations believe AI agents have already delivered measurable ROI. The question facing leaders in 2026 isn't whether to adopt AI agents but how to scale them while addressing integration challenges (46%), data quality (42%), and change management (39%).

MARKET INSIGHT

The state of generative AI tech 2025

Brief: For Menlo’s third annual report, the firm surveyed ~500 U.S. enterprise decision-makers and combined insights with a bottom-up model of the generative AI market spanning model APIs, infrastructure, and apps.

Breakdown:

• Companies spent $37B on generative AI in 2025 ($18B on infrastructure, $19B on applications) a 3.2x increase from $11.5B in 2024.

• Last year, 47% of AI solutions were built internally and 53% purchased; today, 76% are purchased as "ready-made AI” reaches production faster.

• Anthropic now earns 40% of enterprise LLM spend, up from 12% in 2023, compared to OpenAI at 27% and Google at 21%.

• General-purpose copilots like ChatGPT Enterprise and Claude for Work are 10x larger than agents (e.g. Writer) but adoption is expected to grow.

• Despite the talk of “agents,” only 16% of enterprise deployments qualify as true agents planning, acting, and adapting autonomously.

Why it’s important: Two years ago, generative AI was mostly pilots and proofs of concept. Today, it’s a $37B market, over 6% of all software, achieved within three years of ChatGPT. AI has become core to how work gets done, and enterprises seeing real returns are doubling down.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

BCG: Improving AI adoption quality

Brief: BCG published insights on how leaders should understand employees’ personal adoption journeys and the psychological and organizational barriers if AI is to be embedded into core work activities.

Breakdown:

• BCG outlines stages of employee AI adoption: information assistance, task assistance, delegation, and semi-autonomous collaboration.

• Most firms progress toward semi-autonomous collaboration, with rare examples reaching fully autonomous orchestration by AI agents.

• There are five personas across these stages: AI champions, independent explorers, adopters, passive observers, and cautious skeptics.

• 85% of employees remain in stages two and three of adoption, while fewer than 10% have reached semi-autonomous collaboration.

• Leaders can accelerate adoption by harnessing early adopters, creating learning space, activating managers, and managing skeptics.

Why it’s important: Real value comes from changing behaviors, not just increasing usage. Leaders need to assess adoption quality, not logins, if AI is to reshape work and avoid repeating the shallow deployments that have limited impact across many organizations.

Bain highlighted how AWS re:Invent 2025 showed agents, fine-tuned models, and custom silicon redefining enterprise performance and productivity.

Deloitte’s 72-page Tech Trends explores topics such as the silicon workforce. Separately they cover how unconventional thinkers can give agentic AI an edge.

PwC released a 19-page report on agentic AI in Global Business Services (GBS), covering disruption, execution, and how to shape future GBS models.

OpenAI shared how BNY empowered employees to build AI agents that strengthen client relationships and support teams across the organization.

Google detailed how it built a multi-agent system for advanced business forecasting, alongside innovations in real-time data for agentic AI.

Forrester shared insights from AWS re:Invent 2025, including black box vibe-coding, spec-driven code assistance, and neuro-symbolic guardrails.

Andreessen Horowitz outlined "the biggest problems builders will tackle in 2026" spanning AI-native data, reinforced models, and “know your agent.”

BCG emphasized the role of boards in driving corporate transformation, articulating that vision, not technology, must drive the mission.

OpenAI released GPT-5.2, its “most capable series yet” for professional work, weeks after an internal memo warned of losing ground to Google.

Google launched a significantly upgraded version of its Deep Research agent, now available to developers through a new Interactions API.

IBM announced an $11B acquisition of Confluent to help enterprises connect real-time data to AI systems and strengthen its broader enterprise AI stack.

Meta is preparing to release a new frontier model “Avocado” in early 2026, which “could be a proprietary model,” unlike its previous open-source launches.

Mistral introduced Devstral 2, an upgraded coding model family, and unveiled Vibe CLI, the company’s first step into autonomous coding agents.

Anthropic launched a beta integration that lets developers assign coding tasks to Claude Code in Slack, transforming chat threads into dev workflows.

OpenAI added an Instacart shopping integration to let ChatGPT users purchase groceries, making it the first Instant Checkout option inside the app.

The US signed an executive order to challenge states' AI rules and pave the way for a single, unified federal regulatory framework.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Google - Applied AI Director

Fidelity Investments - Head of AI

Takeda - Generative AI Director

EVENTS

Deloitte - Future of Work with Agentic AI - January 8, 2026

Business Transformation World Summit - January 26-28, 2026

OpenText & Cognizant - Reimagining FS with AI - January 29, 2026

Originally conceived as a practical communication for executives the editor, Lewis Walker, has worked with, this briefing now serves as a trusted resource for thousands of senior decision-makers shaping the future of enterprise AI.

If your AI product or service adds value to this audience, contact us for information on a limited number of sponsorship opportunities.

We also welcome feedback as we continue to refine the briefing.