Global business leaders will make 2026 the year of the AI agent
“Businesses are ready to scale, they’re betting big on agentic AI to do it… and they’re right to do so.” That’s DeepL’s Chief Technology Officer Sebastian Enderlein’s description of a huge shift in the trajectory of AI that will arrive in 2026. New research from DeepL proves him right on all three counts. It also shows how the enthusiasm for agentic is multiplying confidence in the business value of other forms of AI too.
How agents amplify business confidence in AI: The story in 6 stats
Six key findings from the DeepL research emphasize the speed and scale of agentic AI adoption, and the impact this is having on AI strategies as a whole:
- 69% of global business leaders expect agentic to transform their business by the end of 2026
- 25% report this is already happening
- 71% prioritize AI investments in workflow automation
- 63% prioritize autonomous decision-making from AI
- 54% say real-time voice translation will be essential in 2026
- 51% believe AI will create more new roles than it replaces
Our data comes from a survey of just over 5,000 global executives across the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan. We asked them about their expectations for AI in 2026, their priorities for investments, the returns they expect and the returns they’re already seeing. The answers make it absolutely clear that 2026 will be the year of the AI agent. As DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski puts it, “AI agents are no longer experimental, they are inevitable.”
A new role for AI
During 2025, businesses have come under growing pressure to demonstrate real impact from their AI investments. In agentic AI, they’ve found a solution, with 69% of global business leaders now confidently expecting agents to drive a major transformation of their business by the end of 2026. This includes 25% of business leaders who say the transformation is already underway. In fact, 22% say that AI agents have already proven their value through tangible ROI and efficiency gains.
Business leaders have recognized that agentic AI offers a new route to value. It’s not just another tool or set of tools to add to their tech stack, but a new role for technology in orchestrating the tools that they already have.
The great frustration of enterprise tech investment has been that the more productivity tools you add to a tech stack, the greater the productivity drag that results from employees having to switch between those tools. Knowledge workers end up acting as IT troubleshooters, figuring out how to navigate different systems. They drown in tools that are meant to help them. AI agents, with their ability to orchestrate different systems, can take over all of these time-consuming tasks. They exist to make workflows work.
A glance at the AI investment priorities makes it clear why this new role for AI is so welcome. In our research, 71% of business leaders told us that they would prioritize AI investments in workflow automation, and that they are interested in end-to-end task execution across business processes. Separately, 63% confirmed that autonomous decision-making was a characteristic of AI that they would prioritize. These are the areas in which agents excel.
Transforming the scope of AI and translation
Something similar is happening in the area of language and localization. Executives know that global businesses can’t continue to function effectively when every translation involves a trade-off of time, quality and cost. They need all three.
This is particularly evident when it comes to international meetings and conversations. Within just a year of the launch of DeepL Voice, enterprise-standard, real-time voice translation is now seen as essential by over half of global business leaders.
At DeepL Dialogues in Berlin last month, Jodi Sweed, the VP of Strategy and Development for Aramark, shared compelling evidence of the impact of high-quality, real-time voice translations. She explained how, when working with global teams, calls scheduled for an hour would easily take up a full 90 minutes through participants struggling to make themselves understood. Implementing DeepL Voice boosted productivity by regaining this lost time, and by ensuring that expert voices were heard in any language.
Delivering on the promise of AI that elevates
The applications of AI that business leaders are turning to have a crucial characteristic in common: they elevate productivity and enable each employee to do more. When this happens, businesses find that the best way to grow is to hire more people, not fewer. Over half of leaders expect AI to create more roles than it replaces.
Agentic and language AI sweep away repetitive tasks, save time and enable easier and more effective collaboration. Their value doesn’t come from replacing knowledge work but from accelerating it, increasing its productivity and growing its impact. That’s always been the promise of AI. Business leaders are confident that they’ve found the applications of the technology that will deliver it.