Why Do Most Enterprises Lack an AI Agent Outside Engineering?

Alex Lieberman says enterprise adoption of AI looks like milestones in a race, and the drop-off is steep. Of about 100 enterprises Tenex is talking with, about 90% have rolled out Claude or Codex to employees. Teaching people how to use it, which he treats as at least as important as the technology, is around 60%. Coding agents inside the engineering org are closer to half of those companies, not the 70% or 80% people at the conference guess.

Agents in production for work that is not building software fall to about 5%. Most of the enterprises they talk with that have more than 1,000 employees do not have an agent in production doing non-engineering work. The common request is still an agent for a back-office task, which is why much of Tenex's work is now putting agents into production for repeatable work outside the engineering org.