Enterprise investment in AI agents is set to increase sharply over the next year, according to a new survey released by Zapier, underscoring both growing adoption and persistent concerns around governance and security.
The survey of more than 500 U.S.-based enterprise leaders found that 84 percent plan to increase spending on AI agents over the next 12 months. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said their organizations are already using or testing AI agents, suggesting the technology is moving beyond experimentation and into early production environments.
Businesses, however, remain cautious. While interest in autonomous systems is high, most enterprises continue to favor human oversight. Zapier’s data shows that a “human-in-the-loop” approach is the most common operating model, reflecting ongoing unease about data privacy, security, and control as agents take on more responsibility within business processes.
“Enterprises are rushing to adopt AI agents because the potential for automating routine workflows is massive; 30 percent of leaders see this as the greatest potential use case,” said Emily Mabie, AI Automation Engineer at Zapier.
Customer support and operations emerged as the departments most likely to deploy AI agents, while data management tasks such as data entry and extraction were the most common use cases overall. At the same time, security and data privacy concerns ranked as the top barriers slowing broader adoption, mirroring findings from other surveys on enterprise AI tool sprawl.