Menlo Ventures: enterprise AI spending hit $177 billion in 2026, up 5.4x in one year

Venture capital firm Menlo Ventures released its 2026 State of Enterprise AI report on November 3, based on a survey of nearly 400 U.S. enterprise decision-makers overseeing more than $4 billion in AI spending. The headline figure: enterprise AI deployment spending reached $176.8 billion by September 2026, up 5.4x from $33 billion a year earlier.

The growth is being driven more by deeper spending among existing adopters than by new buyers. The share of enterprises paying for AI rose only modestly, from 55% to 65%, while the average company spent 4.7 times its 2025 AI budget — roughly 2.5 times what it had planned. AI agents (software that acts on its own rather than waiting for a human prompt) are now the dominant reason spending has surged. On OpenRouter, a platform that routes traffic across AI models, agents now generate 80% of all tokens, or units of processed text, about seven times human-driven usage. Enterprise AI application spending reached approximately $77 billion, up from $19 billion last year, with coding tools accounting for 44% and chatbots 32% of that total.

Anthropuc, OpenAI, and Google together captured 69% of enterprise AI deployment spending, up from 50% in 2025. Within enterprise API spending specifically, Anthropic extended its share from 40% to 55%, OpenAI rose from 27% to 31%, and Google fell from 21% to 9%. New budgets funded 55% of incremental AI spending, with only 22% coming out of existing software budgets.

For CIOs and IT directors building or reviewing AI budgets, the data suggests actual spending routinely exceeds forecasts by a wide margin. It is a good time to pressure-test AI budget assumptions for 2027 and to understand which AI agents inside the organization are consuming the most compute, since agent-driven usage can grow quickly and without direct human oversight.