How AI agents are becoming the invisible infrastructure of enterprises

The trend is unequivocal: artificial intelligence is no longer seen as a tool and becoming a central infrastructure for business operations. By 2025, about 88% of organizations already use AI in at least one business function, with many expanding use cases and exploiting intelligent agents beyond pilot projects. Renowned consulting firms indicate that this transition to deeper uses will continue to accelerate throughout 2026 and 2027 as the capabilities of AI agents become embedded in the core of the business.

Three main movements explain this change. The first is the arrival of multimodal models that understand and generate text, image, audio and other data formats in an integrated manner, which greatly expands the scope of possible applications and makes interactions with systems more natural and powerful. Gartner itself estimates that 40% of business applications will have AI agents focused on specific tasks by 2026, a significant leap compared to virtually no use in 2025. 

In parallel, the agentic systems are consolidated as the new operational layer of companies. Already today a significant part of organizations is experimenting or deploying AI agents capable of performing complete workflows, such as integrating data between systems, filling out forms, assembling reports and triggering automatic processes in different parts of the operation. Recent research shows that 62% of organizations experience AI agents and about 23% are already expanding these solutions within their corporate operations. 

This intelligent automation movement has been growing at a rapid pace and tends to integrate natively with enterprise software throughout 2026.

This advance creates a new logic of operational abundance, in which historical bottlenecks in customer service, data analysis, supply chain management and technical support begin to be eliminated or drastically reduced. Industry reports point out that organizations that incorporate AI agents into their core processes observe significant gains in efficiency and productivity. 

At the same time, the transition from isolated project AI to infrastructure implies process redesign, new governance models and reconfiguration of internal roles.

Therefore, 2026 is designed as a tipping point in which AI ceases to be perceived as accessory functionality and starts to function as strategic business infrastructure. Companies that have already internalized this change are redesigning flows, reviewing management structures and taking competitive advantage of this reorganization. In this new scenario, the market differential is no longer simply “usar AI” operation model around artificial intelligence capabilities, a distinction that should separate those that advance at the pace required by the next decade from those that still treat AI as an isolated experiment.

*Felipe Giannetti, former StartSe partner and executive responsible for leading the expansion of StackAI, an American startup specializing in corporate automation with artificial intelligence (AI), to Texas (USA) and Brazil.