Impact trends: What agents may change in 2026

Trend 6: Productivity gains reshape software development economics

Organizations that intelligently integrate agents into their software development lifecycle will see timeline compression that affects what projects are viable and how quickly companies can respond to market opportunities.

Predictions

• Three multipliers drive acceleration: Agent capabilities, orchestration improvements, and better use of human experience compound to create step-function improvements rather than linear gains as each enables the others.
• Timeline compression changes project viability: Development that once took weeks now takes days, making previously unviable projects feasible and enabling organizations to respond to market opportunities more quickly.
• Economics of software development shift: Total cost of ownership decreases as agents augment engineer capacity, project timelines shorten, and faster time to value improves return on investment.

Productivity through output volume, not just speed

Internal research at Anthropic reveals an interesting productivity pattern: engineers report a net decrease in time spent per task category, but a much larger net increase in output volume. This suggests that AI enables increased productivity primarily through greater output—more features shipped, more bugs fixed, more experiments run—rather than simply doing the same work faster.

Notably, about 27% of AI-assisted work consists of tasks that wouldn't have been done otherwise: scaling projects, building nice-to-have tools like interactive dashboards, and exploratory work that wouldn't be cost-effective if done manually. Engineers report fixing more "papercuts"—minor issues that improve quality of life but are typically deprioritized—because AI makes addressing them feasible.

Trend 7: Non-technical use cases expand across organizations

We anticipate that one of the most significant trends in 2026 will be steady growth in agentic coding used by functional and business-process teams to create their own solutions to problems they experience, and improvements to processes they use every day.

Predictions

• Coding capabilities democratize beyond engineering: Non-technical teams across sales, marketing, legal, and operations gain the ability to automate workflows and build tools with little or no engineering intervention or coding expertise.
• Domain experts implement solutions directly: The hands-on experts who understand problems deeply gain confidence in using agents to initiate solutions themselves, removing the bottleneck of filing a ticket and then waiting for development teams.
• Productivity gains extend across entire organizations: Problems not worth engineering time get solved, experimental workflows become trivial to attempt, and manual processes get automated.

Trend 8: Agentic coding improves security defenses—but also offensive uses

Agentic coding is transforming security in two directions at once. As models become more powerful and better aligned, building security into products becomes easier. Now, any engineer can leverage AI to perform security reviews, hardening, and monitoring that previously required specialized expertise. But the same capabilities that help defenders are also capable of helping attackers scale their efforts.

Predictions

• Security knowledge becomes democratized: With improved agents, any engineer can become a security engineer capable of delivering in-depth security reviews, hardening, and monitoring. Engineers will still need to consider security and consult with specialists, but it will become easier to build hardened and secure applications.
• Threat actors scale attacks: While agents will benefit defensive uses, they will also benefit offensive uses. In order to defend against this dual-use technology, it will become more important for engineers to build in security from the start.
• Agentic cyber defense systems rise: Automated agentic systems enable security responses at machine speed, automating detection and response to match the pace of autonomous threats.

The balance favors prepared organizations. Teams that use agentic tools to bake security in from the start will be better positioned to defend against adversaries using the same technology.