GenAI Adoption Survey: Unlocking Autonomous AI

What You Need to Know:

• Our survey of 689 U.S. respondents showed that AI adoption is pervasive.
• More sophisticated semi-autonomous agent adoption is expected to increase by more than 2x in the next 12-18 months.
• Three-quarters of respondents cited positive ROI on their AI investments vs. only 3% negative.
• Horizontal AI had the highest ROI and is most associated with delivering agentic automation.
• Headcount cuts were cited as a source for AI funding, but ranked below productivity gains, dedicated AI innovation budgets, and other cost savings.

The TD Cowen Insight

In our newest report on the Productivity Suite market, we have expanded our focus on artificial intelligence (AI) adoption across Native AI, Neutral AI and Horizontal AI. The data suggests incumbents may be more favorably positioned than is priced in, especially in the enterprise and with Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors. Evolving from human-prompted AI to Autonomous AI unlocks a shift in how AI is used.

Our Thesis

GenAI adoption is already pervasive as 92% of respondents use at least one of the top three vendors, and ~2.6 AI agent vendors (paid or free) on average are deployed per company. While adoption is high, monetization is still low. However, this is expected to materially increase, especially since 75% of respondents cite a positive Return on Investment (ROI) from AI agents. In fact, a majority of surveyed users are somewhat or very likely to upgrade their suite subscriptions within the next 12-18 months, providing vendors with a strong runway ahead. Moreover, adoption of Autonomous AI is set to more than double by 2H27 which will drive higher AI spending via increased AI agent adoption and subscription upgrades, especially in the enterprise.

AI Agent Categorization

Native AI: Commonly embedded inside productivity suites and typically sold as part of the suite licence, Native AI is most often recognized as traditional GenAI features (i.e. human-driven prompts).

Horizontal AI: Domain-specific agents embedded in horizontal enterprise platforms experience low usage now (15% overall), but agentic and autonomous capabilities could drive growth.

Neutral AI: As vendor-neutral, third-party agents, Neutral AI is appreciated for cross-use interoperability and integration across stand-alone AI.

Adoption by Agent Type

Perhaps most noteworthy is that — while Horizontal Agents have the lowest usage today — they are perceived to deliver the highest ROI, particularly when it comes to true Agentic AI capabilities. This vision suggests there should be a catch-up in adoption as companies mature from human-prompted AI to autonomous AI, which bodes well for Enterprise SaaS vendors. Regarding Neutral Agents, there are the two emerging ones to watch, which today are often found in shadow IT usage. These agents are more likely to capture greater wallet share inside smaller orgs vs. large enterprises.

What Is Proprietary?

The findings from our GenAI Adoption reports are based on a survey of purchasing decision-makers in the U.S., spanning customer sizes and verticals. This survey work provides insights into key AI trends such as company and industry adoption levels, usage trends across agent vendors and agent types, ROI measurements and funding sources, upgrade intentions and future growth drivers, key barriers and enablers to AI adoption, and more. In addition, the survey provides an update on market share trends in the core Productivity Suite market, alongside potential disruption in adjacent markets via Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).

Financial and Industry Model Implications

Strong data points on AI usage and future adoption/upgrade intentions bode well for:

• key incumbent vendors in the Productivity Suite market – given their ability to easily embed human-prompted GenAI capabilities into daily user workflows; and
• key incumbent players in the Enterprise SaaS market – given their ability to integrate autonomous agentic capabilities with mission-critical datasets and complex business processes residing in systems-of-record. We think the survey data paints a more favorable AI monetization picture than what's being priced into stocks today, especially with Enterprise SaaS vendors, as it suggests that while AI adoption has been slow to date, it should start to inflect higher as companies move up in AI maturity and embrace agentic automation. While early — and we will update our models upon seeing confirmation — we suspect this trend could push growth rates higher and potentially reaccelerate growth for both groups.

The two offsetting factors to watch

Budget competition from emerging AI vendors. Our survey work suggests that emerging AI vendors are more competitive in the Small and Medium-sized Business (SMB)/mid-market, which could carry more disruption to SMB SaaS.

Seat-based headwinds from headcount cuts. Data suggests headcount cuts are the lowest source of AI funding today. However, this grows as companies invest in autonomous AI capabilities and, as this next evolution of AI takes greater hold, we argue that incumbent vendors will need to evolve towards a hybrid approach that includes consumption/usage/outcome-based pricing to offset seat-based growth headwinds.