2026: THE STATE OF ENTERPRISE AI

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

The labs selling you model access are also competing for your customers' software budgets. Menlo's yearly enterprise AI report estimates the frontier labs now capture 69% of enterprise AI deployment spending. Agents are growing the pie, though, since new budgets funded 55% of the extra AI spend in Menlo's survey, and the firm reads that as companies paying for work software couldn't do before. Startups still take 61% of application spending once the labs' own apps are left out.