Menlo Ventures reports enterprise AI spending surges to $177B

Enterprise AI spending has hit an annualized run rate of $176.8 billion, according to Menlo Ventures’ latest State of Enterprise AI report. In 2025, that figure was $33 billion.

That works out to a 5.4-fold jump.

The surprise is where the money comes from. It isn’t mostly new companies signing up. It’s existing users spending a lot more.

The details: deeper pockets, not more wallets

The report, titled “2026: The State of Enterprise AI,” pegs the $176.8 billion run rate as of September 2026.

Adoption itself grew modestly. The share of companies investing in AI rose from 55% to 65%, according to the report.

Budgets didn’t hold up well either. Enterprises spent approximately 2.5 times what they had planned for AI, on average.

At the application layer, spending reached approximately $77 billion. Coding tools made up $34 billion of that, while productivity tools accounted for $25 billion.

Agents take over the workload

Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das says AI agents now account for 80% of usage. Businesses are moving past chatbots toward systems that can complete complex tasks on their own.

The report’s data backs that up. Agents generate 80% of the tokens on OpenRouter, a platform that routes requests across AI models.

Agent usage on the platform has grown 37 times since February 2026.

Background: a market with three main players

The model layer has consolidated around a small group of providers. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google dominate enterprise spending on large language model APIs.

Anthropic leads with a 55% share, up from 40%. OpenAI follows at 31%, with Google at 9%.