The narrative around generative artificial intelligence is clearly shifting. While the last two years have been marked by the deployment of tools to support employees, the coming period will be defined by autonomous AI agents becoming an integral part of the corporate infrastructure. The latest data from DeepL, a survey of 5,000 business leaders from G7 markets, leaves no illusions about the pace of this transformation. As many as 69 per cent of decision makers predict that AI agents will radically transform operational processes in their organisations by 2026.
The period of experimentation is coming to an end. Although 44 per cent of respondents point to 2026 as the watershed moment, for a quarter of the companies surveyed the revolution is already happening now. Only a market margin of 7 per cent remains sceptical about the impact of autonomous systems on business. However, confidence in the technology is no longer a matter of faith and is becoming derived from hard indicators. Leaders are conditioning further adoption mainly on demonstrable return on investment (ROI) and productivity, as indicated by 22 per cent of respondents. Human and organisational factors, including the ability of employees to adapt in the new digital environment, are proving to be equally important.
Despite the optimism, the market sees clear barriers to entry. The main inhibitors are still cost and the insufficient technological maturity of current solutions. Interestingly, concerns about job cuts are giving way to a narrative of competence transformation. More than half of managers expect AI to create more new roles than eliminate them, although this places a hard condition on the table: artificial intelligence skills will be required for most new hires.
In the context of globalisation, ‘Language AI’ is becoming a key component of the new infrastructure. Companies are stop treating real-time speech translation as a technological curiosity and are starting to see it as a fundamental operational function. Currently, 32 per cent of companies see it as essential, but this figure is expected to rise to 54 per cent within two years. European markets are showing particularly aggressive investment plans in this area, led by the UK and Germany, where nearly three quarters of companies are planning to increase their budgets for linguistic AI. These figures suggest that for IT integrators and vendors, the time is coming when AI deployments will cease to be an innovation project and become a modernisation standard, on a par with cloud migration.
