AI Agent Statistics 2027: Adoption, ROI, and Security

40% of companies with $1 billion or more in revenue are now scaling AI agents, and Microsoft alone has more than 50 million AI agents registered. Yet only 7.6% of online stores have an AI agent answering their shoppers, while 77.7% already have a shopping endpoint that other companies' AI agents can use.

We checked 4,842 online stores in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in November 2026. Below are our numbers from the Matey Store Chat Audit first, then the latest AI agent statistics from Gartner, McKinsey, KPMG, PwC, Microsoft, and others, each with its source and date.

Matey designs and builds bespoke AI agents and tools for ecommerce stores, retailers, tradies, and service businesses.

Key AI agent statistics for 2027

• 7.6% of online stores have an AI agent answering shoppers, but 77.7% have a live shopping endpoint that outside AI agents can use (Matey Store Chat Audit, November 2026)
• Only 0.3% of online stores block AI agents in their robots.txt file (Matey Store Chat Audit, November 2026)
• 40% of companies with $1 billion or more in revenue are scaling AI agents, up from 27% a year earlier (McKinsey, August 2026)
• 71% of organisations expect to deploy agentic AI within 12 months, but only 21% have governance for it (Gartner, October 2026)
• About 1 in 4 US adults has tried an AI agent: 41% of the 64% who use AI (Menlo Ventures, September 2026)
• 10% of workers use AI agents every day, up from 6% a year earlier (PwC, 2026)
• More than 50 million AI agents are registered in Microsoft's Agent 365 (Microsoft, October 2026)
• Spending on AI agents and assistants will grow 77% to $29.2 billion in 2026 (Gartner, September 2026)
• The best AI agent completes 41.3% of real freelance projects to a client's standard (Remote Labor Index, November 2026)
• Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027, Gartner predicts (June 2025)
• 52% of organisations had a security incident involving an AI agent in the past year (Gravitee, November 2026)
• More than 40% of pull requests on GitHub now start with an AI agent (GitHub, October 2026)

AI agent statistics for online stores

These numbers come from the Matey Store Chat Audit. In November 2026 we loaded the homepages of 4,842 online stores in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, checked whether an AI agent answers their shoppers, read every store's robots.txt file, and checked each one for a shopping endpoint for AI agents.

Only 7.6% of online stores have an AI agent answering shoppers

• 7.6% of online stores have an AI agent answering shoppers in their chat, which leaves 92.4% with none (Matey Store Chat Audit, November 2026)
• That's 30.5% of the stores that offer chat at all. Staff answer the chat on the rest
• By country: 8.8% in the US, 8.1% in New Zealand, 7.8% in Australia, 6.7% in Canada, and 6% in the UK

13.6% of the busiest online stores have an AI agent answering shoppers, twice the rate of smaller stores

• Among online stores in the 10,000 most visited websites in their country, 13.6% had an AI agent answering shoppers, against 9% of stores ranked 10,000 to 100,000 and 6.9% of stores ranked 100,000 to 1 million (Matey Store Chat Audit, November 2026)
• By platform: 8.8% of Shopify stores, 6.9% of BigCommerce stores, 5.4% of Magento stores, and 3.2% of WooCommerce stores

27.7% of Shopify Inbox stores have its AI agent switched on

• Shopify Inbox comes with an AI agent that can answer shoppers. 27.7% of stores running Shopify Inbox had it switched on, and staff answered on the rest (Matey Store Chat Audit, November 2026)
• 40% of Gorgias stores had Gorgias's AI Agent switched on
• Dedicated AI chatbots, like Rep AI and Zipchat, ran on 0.5% of online stores

77.7% of online stores have a live shopping endpoint for AI agents

• 77.7% of online stores have a live Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) endpoint, which lets an AI agent search a store's products, build a cart, and check out (Matey Store Chat Audit, November 2026)
• It comes switched on with the platform: 98.5% of Shopify stores and 97.7% of BigCommerce stores had one, against none of the WooCommerce or Magento stores we checked
• Google announced UCP in January 2026 with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart
• 66.8% of online stores point AI agents to a page of instructions written for them (agents.md) in their robots.txt file

Only 0.3% of online stores block AI agents in robots.txt

• 0.3% of online stores use their robots.txt file to block the AI agents that fetch pages for a person, such as ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, and Perplexity-User (Matey Store Chat Audit, November 2026)
• 96.6% block no AI crawler or AI agent at all
• 3.4% block at least one AI training crawler, most often Common Crawl's CCBot (2.9%), OpenAI's GPTBot (2.8%), and ByteDance's Bytespider (2.7%), and 89.8% of those stores still let AI agents in
• 2.1% send Cloudflare's content signal telling AI companies not to train on their pages

20% of Magento stores block AI crawlers, against 1% of Shopify stores

• 20% of Magento stores block at least one AI crawler in robots.txt, against 14.7% of custom-built stores, 9.6% of WooCommerce stores, 1% of Shopify stores, and 0.8% of BigCommerce stores (Matey Store Chat Audit, November 2026)

58.6% of chats with AI shop assistants come in outside business hours

• 58.6% of shopper chats with Matey's AI shop assistants came in before 9am, after 5pm, or on weekends, in the store's own time, and 65.6% came from phones (Matey chat data, 2026)
• 62.6% of chats ended with the assistant showing products
• The most common question was about size and fit (24.4% of chats), then price, sales, and codes (14.2%), and returns and exchanges (13%)
• Our ecommerce chatbot statistics have the full store audit

AI agent adoption statistics

The AI agent adoption rate is 37% to 62% in the latest surveys

• 62% of large US companies are building, testing, or deploying AI agents, up from 42% a year earlier (KPMG, September 2026)
• 40% of companies with $1 billion or more in revenue are scaling AI agents, against 22% of smaller companies (McKinsey, August 2026)
• 37% of organisations have deployed AI agents, up from 17% in Gartner's previous survey, and another 34% plan to within 12 months (Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, August 2026)
• At the end of 2025, 11% of organisations were using agentic AI in production (Deloitte Tech Trends 2026, December 2025)

40% of companies with $1 billion or more in revenue are scaling AI agents

• 40% of companies with $1 billion or more in revenue are scaling AI agents in at least one business function, up from 27% a year earlier, in McKinsey's survey of 1,719 people in 97 countries (May and June 2026, published August 2026)
• 73% of these large companies use AI agents in some way: 40% are scaling them, 17% are piloting them, and 16% are experimenting
• Among smaller companies, 22% are scaling AI agents, about the same as in 2025, and 59% use them in some way

71% of organisations expect to deploy agentic AI within a year, but only 21% have governance for it

• 71% of organisations expect to deploy agentic AI in the next 12 months, but only 21% have agentic AI governance in place, in a Gartner survey of more than 2,000 CIOs and technology executives (second quarter of 2026, published October 2026)
• In the same Gartner survey, 37% had already deployed AI agents, and another 34% planned to within a year (August 2026)

25% of large US companies are building or running multi-agent systems, up from 6%

• 25% of large US companies are developing or running multi-agent systems, where several AI agents work together, up from 6% in each of the two quarters before, in KPMG's survey of 314 business leaders at companies with $1 billion or more in revenue (July and August 2026, published September 2026)
• Worldwide, 38% of companies are developing or running multi-agent systems, in KPMG's Global AI Pulse survey of 2,131 leaders in 20 countries (September 2026)

Nearly 90% of the Fortune 500 have active AI agents built with Microsoft's tools

• Nearly 90% of Fortune 500 companies have active AI agents built with Microsoft's low-code and no-code tools, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on 29 April 2026, up from more than 80% in Microsoft's count for November 2025

40% of companies now let AI make decisions without human approval

• 40% of companies let AI make decisions without human approval, at least to a moderate degree, in Deloitte's State of AI in the Enterprise survey of 3,500 leaders in 25 countries (May and June 2026, published October 2026)
• At 23% of companies, it's unclear who is accountable when an AI system gets something wrong
• Only 9% of companies running several AI agents on the same workflow say those workflows are fully governed

AI agent usage statistics

About 1 in 4 US adults has tried an AI agent

• 41% of Americans who use AI have tried an AI agent, and 24% use one regularly, in Menlo Ventures' survey of 5,067 US adults with Morning Consult (July 2026, published September 2026)
• With 64% of US adults using AI, that's about one in four Americans who have tried an AI agent, and about 15% who use one regularly
• 32% of AI users have let AI act for them at least once without a final sign-off, and 26% of shoppers who use AI have let it complete a purchase

10% of workers use AI agents every day, up from 6% a year earlier

• 10% of workers worldwide use AI agents every day, up from 6% in 2025, in PwC's Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey of 49,364 workers in 48 countries and regions (May and June 2026)
• 64% used AI at work in the past 12 months, up from 54%, and 22% use generative AI every day
• 54% of salespeople have used AI agents, and nearly 9 in 10 expect to by 2027, in Salesforce's State of Sales survey of 4,050 sales professionals in 22 countries (February 2026)

49% of US adults use AI chatbots, and 44% use ChatGPT

• 49% of US adults use AI chatbots, and about a quarter use one every day, in Pew Research Center's survey of 5,119 US adults (February 2026, published June 2026)
• ChatGPT is the most used, by 44% of US adults, then Google's Gemini (24%), Microsoft Copilot (17%), Meta AI (14%), Grok (8%), and Claude (6%)
• OpenAI says ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users (September 2026), and Google says the Gemini app has more than 1 billion monthly users (October 2026)

Only 9% of consumers are ready to let an AI agent shop on its own

• 9% of consumers are open to an AI agent shopping fully on its own, and 32% are ready to hand it their purchase decisions, in Accenture's survey of 25,590 consumers in 16 countries (January 2026, published June 2026)
• 6% of shoppers would give an AI agent full autonomy to buy, 56% would let one search and compare for them, and 35% would give one their saved payment details, in a Visa Acceptance and PYMNTS survey of 5,241 consumers in the US, Brazil, and the UAE (January to March 2026)

AI agent market size statistics

The AI agent market is worth about $11 billion in 2026

• Market researchers put the AI agent market at $10.9 billion (Grand View Research, June 2026), $11.55 billion (Precedence Research, July 2026), and $11.78 billion (Fortune Business Insights, October 2026) in 2026
• They forecast $182.9 billion by 2033 (Grand View Research), $251.38 billion by 2034 (Fortune Business Insights), and $294.66 billion by 2035 (Precedence Research). Put on the same year, those forecasts land between about $49 billion and $55 billion in 2030 (our calculation from each firm's growth rate), close to MarketsandMarkets' $52.62 billion by 2030 (April 2025)

Spending on AI agents and assistants will grow 77% to $29.2 billion in 2026

• Worldwide spending on AI agents and assistants will reach $29.2 billion in 2026, up 77% from $16.5 billion in 2025, and $65.5 billion in 2027, Gartner forecasts (September 2026)
• That's about 1% of the $2.67 trillion Gartner expects to be spent on AI in 2026. Gartner counts AI built into existing business software, embedded agents included, separately, as AI software ($461.6 billion in 2026)

More than 50 million AI agents are registered in Microsoft's Agent 365

• More than 50 million AI agents are registered in Microsoft's Agent 365, up more than 30% in a quarter, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on 28 October 2026
• The number of active AI agents in Microsoft 365 grew 15 times between March 2025 and March 2026 (Microsoft Work Trend Index, May 2026)

Enterprises ran 28.6 million AI agents in 2025, and more than 2.2 billion are forecast by 2030

• Statista puts the number of active AI agents in enterprises at 28.6 million in 2025, rising to more than 2.2 billion by 2030 (March 2026)
• IDC forecasts more than 1 billion actively deployed AI agents by 2029, carrying out 217 billion actions a day (December 2025)
• Gartner predicts the average Fortune 500 company will have more than 150,000 AI agents in use by 2028, up from fewer than 15 in 2025 (April 2026)

Agentic AI startups raised $24.2 billion in 2025

• Venture-backed agentic AI companies raised $24.2 billion across 1,311 deals in 2025, nearly 73% of everything they had raised from 2015 to 2024, according to PitchBook (April 2026)

Salesforce's Agentforce passed $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue

• Agentforce, Salesforce's AI agent platform, passed $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue, up more than 240% in a year (Salesforce, August 2026)
• Sierra, which builds customer service AI agents, passed $400 million in annual recurring revenue, doubling in five months (October 2026)

AI agent ROI and productivity statistics

66% of companies using AI agents report higher productivity

• 66% of companies using AI agents say the agents have increased productivity, 57% report cost savings, 55% faster decisions, and 54% a better customer experience, in PwC's AI Agent Survey of 300 senior US executives (May 2025)
• 88% plan to increase their AI budgets in the next 12 months because of agentic AI

20% of companies capture 74% of AI's economic gains

• 20% of companies capture 74% of the economic gains from AI, in PwC's 2026 AI Performance Study of 1,217 senior executives (April 2026)
• The leaders are 2.8 times as likely to have increased the number of decisions made with no human involved

AI agent failure rate statistics

The best AI agent completes 41.3% of real freelance projects

• The best AI agent tested delivers work a client would accept on 41.3% of real freelance projects, up from 2.5% when the Remote Labor Index launched in October 2025, so it still falls short on 58.7% (Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety, November 2026)
• The Remote Labor Index is 240 real projects from the freelance site Upwork, judged against the professional's original work

Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027, Gartner predicts

• Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027, because of rising costs, unclear business value, or weak risk controls (June 2025)
• Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of companies selling agentic AI offer real AI agents. Gartner calls the rest "agent washing": rebadging assistants, robotic process automation, and chatbots as agents. The four questions in the Matey agent test tell them apart

40% of enterprises will demote or shut down autonomous AI agents by 2027, Gartner predicts

• Gartner predicts 40% of enterprises will demote or shut down autonomous AI agents by 2027, because of governance gaps they only find after something goes wrong in production (May 2026)
• Gartner also predicts 70% of enterprises will abandon agentic AI built for them by vendors' forward-deployed engineers by 2028 (September 2026)

Nearly 60% of executives say staff have to fix what their AI agents did

• Nearly 60% of executives say their staff have to step in and fix what AI agents did, and more than half have had AI agents act on stale or conflicting data, in an IBM Institute for Business Value survey of 1,000 executives (October 2026)

AI agents now beat people at everyday computer tasks, 86% to 72.4%

• The best AI agent completes 86% of tasks on OSWorld-Verified, a test of everyday computer tasks, against 72.4% for people (August 2026). In 2024 the best model scored 12.2%
• On OSWorld 2.0's long workflows, which take people about 1.6 hours, the best AI agent finished 20.6% (July 2026)

The length of tasks AI agents can finish doubles every 4 to 7 months

• The length of software tasks the best AI models can finish half the time has doubled every 4 to 7 months, according to the AI research nonprofit METR. In early 2025 that was tasks taking an expert about 50 minutes, and by 2026 it was 12 hours or more

AI agent security statistics

52% of organisations had a security incident involving an AI agent in the past year

• 52% of organisations had a confirmed or suspected security or privacy incident involving an AI agent in the past 12 months, in Gravitee's survey of 900 senior technology leaders in the US and the UK (October 2026, published November 2026)
• Only 6% could cut off a rogue AI agent's access within an hour, and 46% would need more than a day
• Fewer than 1 in 10 have a named person accountable for their AI agents, and 16% run more than 150 AI agents, up from 7% in April 2026

Gartner expects 25% of enterprise security breaches to trace back to AI agent abuse by 2028

• By 2028, a quarter of enterprise security breaches will trace back to AI agent abuse, Gartner predicts, because of unmanaged machine access and old credential habits (October 2026)

79% of organisations run AI agents in production, but only 2% use identity security built for them

• 79% of organisations run AI agents in production, but only 2% use identity security tools built for agents, in SailPoint's survey of 340 identity, IT, security, and risk leaders (October 2026)
• AI agents make up 22% of all non-human accounts

Only 47% of security chiefs are confident they can find every AI agent in their company

• 47% of chief information security officers are confident they can identify every AI agent in their organisation, and 21% control their agents' access with shared logins or broad service accounts, in Okta's survey of 306 security chiefs in six countries (July 2026)

80% of companies say their AI agents have done things they weren't meant to

• 80% of companies say their AI agents have taken actions they weren't meant to, in SailPoint's survey of 353 IT professionals at companies with 1,000 or more staff (May 2025)
• 39% say agents reached systems they shouldn't have, and 23% say an agent was tricked into revealing access credentials

AI agent traffic statistics

AI agent requests on Cloudflare's network grew more than 1,700% in a year

• Daily requests from AI agents on Cloudflare's network grew more than 1,700% in a year, and in 2026, for the first time, more than half of internet traffic wasn't human (Cloudflare, September 2026)
• Fewer than 1% of sites on Cloudflare block search crawlers, while 17% block AI training crawlers
• Traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers grew 7,851% in 2025, while human traffic grew 3.1%, across the online interactions HUMAN Security saw (March 2026)

AI coding agent statistics

More than 40% of pull requests on GitHub now start with an AI agent

• More than 40% of pull requests on GitHub were started by an AI agent in September 2026, up from 17% in March, about 110 million in September alone (GitHub Octoverse, October 2026)
• 55% of GitHub Copilot's monthly users use its agent features, up from 35% a year earlier

9 in 10 professional developers use AI coding agents every week

• 9 in 10 professional developers use AI coding agents at work at least weekly, and 68% use them every day, in JetBrains' survey of more than 15,000 developers (May to July 2026, published August 2026)
• Developers say AI agents fully write about 47% of their code

26.2% of developers use AI agents at work, and 65.9% use AI coding assistants or agents

• 26.2% of developers use AI agents or automated workflows at work, and 65.9% use AI coding assistants or coding agents, in Stack Overflow's 2026 Developer Survey of 30,903 developers in 169 countries (June to August 2026, published October 2026)
• Only 6.6% trust AI for important decisions

32% of companies skipped buying software because they built it with AI coding agents

• 32% of companies decided against buying at least one software product or feature because they could build it themselves with agentic coding tools, in McKinsey's survey of 1,719 people (August 2026)

75% of new code at Google is written by AI

• 75% of all new code at Google is now generated by AI and approved by engineers, up from 50% in late 2025, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said (April 2026)
• More than 5 million people use OpenAI's Codex coding agent every week (OpenAI, June 2026)

AI agent customer service statistics

Only 4% of customer service leaders have got the return they expected from AI

• Just 4% of customer service and support leaders have achieved the return they expected from their AI projects, in Gartner's survey of 275 service leaders (July and August 2026, published November 2026)
• Only 21% have cut human support staff because of AI, by 16.7% on average, and 7% have already rehired

Klarna's AI assistant handled 80% of its customer service chats in 2025

• Klarna's AI assistant handled 80% of its customer service chats in 2025, the work of more than 850 full-time staff, saving about $59 million, Klarna reported in its annual filing (February 2026)

Gartner predicts AI agents will resolve 80% of common customer service issues by 2029

• By 2029, agentic AI will resolve 80% of common customer service issues without a person, cutting operating costs by 30%, Gartner predicts (March 2025)

AI agent statistics that get misquoted

MIT did not find that 95% of AI agents fail

• MIT NANDA's The GenAI Divide (July 2025) found 95% of organisations were getting zero return from generative AI pilots, judged on profit and loss six months after the pilot. It was about generative AI tools, not AI agents, and was based on 52 interviews, 153 survey responses from senior leaders, and a review of more than 300 public AI projects

Gartner's 80% customer service figure is a forecast for 2029

• Gartner's 80% is a prediction that agentic AI will resolve 80% of common customer service issues without a person by 2029 (March 2025), not a measure of what AI agents do today

Capgemini's drop in trust from 43% to 27% was among executives

• Trust in fully autonomous AI agents fell from 43% to 27% in a year among 1,500 executives at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, in Capgemini's survey (April 2025). It wasn't a survey of consumers

How we ran the Matey Store Chat Audit

• The stores: 4,842 online stores from Chrome's public lists of the most visited websites in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Chrome UX Report, September 2026). Shopify powered 75.3% of them, WooCommerce 13.5%, custom-built stores 3.2%, and BigCommerce 2.7%
• AI agents answering shoppers: we loaded each homepage in a real browser on 10 and 11 November 2026 and recorded every chat tool that loaded. We opened each Shopify Inbox chat and read each Gorgias store's chat settings to see whether its AI agent answers shoppers, and counted dedicated AI chatbots as AI agents
• robots.txt: on 11 November 2026 we read each store's robots.txt file and counted a store as blocking a crawler or AI agent when its rules shut it out of the homepage, product pages, and collection pages
• AI shopping endpoints: the same day, we requested each store's UCP file (/.well-known/ucp) and counted the stores that returned a live Universal Commerce Protocol manifest
• Real chats: totals only, from shopper chats with AI shop assistants Matey built for Australian online stores in 2026, with test chats left out

How to cite these AI agent statistics

Use any number on this page, with a link back to it. For our own numbers, cite the Matey Store Chat Audit (November 2026) and link to this page. Every chart on this page can be copied, downloaded, or embedded with the link built in. Every other number has its source and date beside it.

What these AI agent statistics mean for businesses

AI agents have moved from pilots to budgets. 40% of large companies are scaling them, Gartner expects spending on AI agents and assistants to grow 77% in 2026, and Microsoft counts more than 50 million registered agents.

The failure numbers are just as clear. The best AI agent finishes 41.3% of real freelance projects, 52% of organisations had a security incident involving an AI agent last year, and Gartner expects over 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027. The AI agents that pay off do one job well, in the business's own tools, with limited access and a person checking anything that matters.

Online stores sit on both sides of that gap. 77.7% of the stores we checked already have a shopping endpoint for outside AI agents, switched on by their platform, but only 7.6% have put an AI agent of their own to work answering shoppers.

Matey designs and builds custom AI agents for ecommerce stores, retailers, tradies, and service businesses, built around the way each business actually runs. You can try a matey on our homepage.