Enterprise AI spending hits $176.8B run rate, up 5.4x in a year

The Menlo Ventures report, titled “2026: The State of Enterprise AI,” puts the annualized run rate at $176.8 billion as of September 2026. A year earlier, in 2025, the same measure sat at $33 billion — a 5.4-fold jump, according to the firm's findings. The twist: the surge isn't coming from a wave of new logos. It's existing customers opening their wallets wider.

Adoption only ticked up. The share of companies investing in AI climbed from 55% to 65%. But the ones already in blew past their own plans, spending roughly 2.5 times what they had budgeted for AI on average.

Application-layer spending landed near $77 billion, Menlo Ventures found. Coding tools swallowed $34 billion of that, with productivity tools at $25 billion. Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das says AI agents now drive 80% of usage, as businesses trade chatbots for systems that finish complex tasks on their own. On OpenRouter, the model-routing platform, agents generate 80% of tokens and have grown 37 times since February 2026.

At the model layer, the field has narrowed to three names. Anthropic leads enterprise spending on large language model APIs with a 55% share, up from 40%, the report says. OpenAI sits at 31%, and Google trails at 9%.