McKinsey's "State of AI 2026" survey, run between May 4 and June 8, 2026 with 1,719 respondents, found that 32% of organizations decided against buying at least one piece of software because they could build it in-house using agentic coding tools. In the tech sector, that figure rises to 41%.
The report's central finding is a measurable shift in how companies decide between acquiring commercial software and building it with AI agents. Among the highest-performing AI companies — the 6% of respondents who attribute at least 5% of their EBIT to artificial intelligence — nearly half already skipped a software purchase to build it with coding agents, versus 31% among the rest of organizations. The share of large companies scaling agents across one or more functions rose from 27% to 40% over the past year.
Adoption isn't friction-free: one in five respondents said their organization is limiting AI usage due to operating-cost considerations. This suggests that as agents move from pilots to production, compute and inference spending is becoming a real factor in scaling decisions, not just a theoretical concern.
Carlos Montiel is an enterprise AI solutions architect. He implements LLMs, Agents, RAG and orchestrators for companies across Guatemala and Latin America. Reach out for a consultation.
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