Salesforce report shows rapid growth in corporate AI agent deployment

The Salesforce Agentic Enterprise Index 2026 report reveals a significant increase in the deployment and capability of AI agents within organizations. The average number of activated agents per company has nearly tripled over the past year, moving from simple conversational tools to agents capable of executing concrete tasks.

Operational capacity is also expanding; agents now utilize an average of six skills, compared to just two at the start of 2025. In high-demand periods, such as the Christmas shopping season, retail agents can utilize up to nine skills, representing a 350% increase. The report identifies two primary adoption models: task-specific implementations, common in B2C sectors for high-volume requests, and multistep implementations, which are more prevalent in complex, regulated industries like manufacturing, financial services, and the public sector.

To measure productivity, the report introduces the Agentic Work Unit (AWU) metric. As of April 2026, the production of AWUs on the Agentforce platform showed a compound monthly growth rate of 15%. Notable growth was seen in the public sector, where AWU production increased 227 times compared to the previous year, and in the healthcare and life sciences sector, which saw a 19-fold increase.