Menlo's 2026 State of Enterprise AI: spend up ~100x in 3 years, 55% is net-new budget
FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-11-04
Full text of Menlo Ventures' 2026 State of Enterprise AI report: enterprise deployment spend grew from $1.7B in 2023 to $176.8B by September 2026 (100x); 55% of new spend is net-new budget, only 22% from existing software budgets; every $1 spent training models generates $1.70 of usage spend.
Key points:
- Agent traffic on OpenRouter is up 37x since overtaking human traffic in February
- Frontier labs command 69% of deployment dollars (vs 50% last year); Anthropic API share 40%→55%, OpenAI 27%→31%, Google 21%→9%
- App market is $77.3B, with coding ($34B) + chatbots ($25B) at 76%; coding is 96% AI-native, Claude Code + Codex hold $24B (70%)
- Open-source handles 19% of tokens but only 4% of spend; average price down to $0.13 per million tokens
Caveats: based on Morning Consult's September 2026 survey of 400 US enterprise decision-makers; market sizing is Menlo's own estimate (annualized revenue); Menlo is an Anthropic investor and starred companies are its portfolio — a disclosed conflict of interest.
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