AI agent adoption by big biz surges 119% as companies embrace autonomous systems

Salesforce’s new Agentic Enterprise Index reveals that AI agent adoption among leading companies surged 119% in the first half of 2025, with consumer-facing industries like retail, travel, and financial services driving the fastest growth. The data shows businesses are rapidly transitioning to what Salesforce calls “agentic enterprises”—organizations where autonomous AI agents work alongside humans to execute complex business processes independently.

What you should know: The shift toward AI agents represents a fundamental change in how businesses operate, moving beyond simple automation to systems that can reason, plan, and adapt.

• Employee interactions with AI agents grew at an average monthly rate of 65% in the first half of 2025, with the volume of back-and-forth conversations increasing by 35% in the past quarter alone.
• Customer service conversations led by AI agents experienced explosive growth, with a six-month compound annual growth rate of 2,199% for the average business.
• Global worker adoption of AI has surged by 233% since fall 2024, with daily AI users reporting 64% better productivity and 81% higher job satisfaction compared to non-users.

The big picture: Consumer-facing industries are embracing AI agents at unprecedented rates, fundamentally reshaping customer interactions and internal operations.

• Retail saw AI and agent actions grow at a monthly average rate of 128% in the first half of 2025.
• Travel and hospitality led all sectors with AI and agent actions growing at a monthly average rate of 133%.
• Financial services followed closely with 105% monthly growth in AI and agent actions during the same period.

How agentic enterprises work: Unlike traditional AI systems limited to predictions or content generation, agentic AI can operate autonomously across multiple business functions.

• Autonomous action: AI agents can reason, plan, and execute sequences of steps to achieve complex business goals without constant human supervision.
• Continuous learning: These systems adapt their strategies based on feedback and past interactions, continuously improving performance over time.
• Goal-oriented execution: Users can provide high-level objectives like “resolve this service case,” and the agent breaks down and executes the necessary steps independently.

In plain English: Think of agentic AI like having a highly capable assistant who doesn’t just follow a script. Instead of simply answering preset questions, these AI systems can understand what you want to accomplish and figure out the steps to get there—much like asking a skilled employee to “handle the Johnson account issue” and trusting them to research the problem, contact the right people, and follow through until it’s resolved.

Customer impact: Consumers are increasingly embracing AI agents, with 94% opting to interact with them when given the choice.

• Escalations to human representatives actually increased from 22% in Q1 2025 to 32% in Q2 2025, indicating AI agents are getting better at identifying when human expertise is needed.
• Nearly 60% of consumers who regularly engage with customer service AI agents feel the technology has become more helpful over the past year.
• The most common AI agent use cases include customer FAQs, order inquiries, conversation summaries, knowledge retrieval, and personalized product recommendations.

Why this matters: Agentic AI represents a $450 billion opportunity by 2028 through revenue growth and cost savings, making it a top priority for business leaders.

• 79% of CEOs believe AI will impact their industry within the next three years.
• The top three use cases for AI agents are customer service, internal business automation, and sales—with email drafting, task creation, and meeting scheduling leading sales applications.
• Service organizations are seeing the most dramatic adoption, with the average number of customer service conversations led by agents growing 22 times in the first half of 2025.

What they’re saying: Salesforce’s research reveals the collaborative potential of human-AI partnerships in the workplace.

• The data shows that “humans and AI agents collaborate to co-create more value quickly” in what the company calls “the new hybrid workforce.”
• A global survey of over 6,500 service professionals revealed that by 2027, 50% of service cases are expected to be resolved by AI.