90% of Enterprises Actively Adopting AI Agents, Study Finds

More than half of organizations now have an agentic AI roadmap in place, 79% expect full-scale adoption within three years, according to the latest Kong Inc. report 

SAN FRANCISCO, September 17, 2025 — Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API and AI technologies, today released findings from its latest research report, which explores how businesses are preparing to integrate autonomous AI agents into real-world operations. The report, titled Agentic AI in the Enterprise: Paving the Path to Production, highlights an inflection point in enterprise AI, with 90% of respondents with insight into the matter reporting their organization is actively adopting AI agents. As companies look to harness agentic AI to reduce costs, streamline operations, and accelerate automation, 79% of respondents expect full-scale adoption within three years. Customer support is cited as the leading use case for GenAI today, with 58% of enterprises citing AI-powered support systems as delivering the most meaningful business impact to date. 

"This research shows how quickly agentic AI is moving from theory to practice, but it’s also clear that adoption could stall without strong API management. APIs are critical to agents, as they can't work without secure data connectivity or the necessary governance that goes with this," said Augusto Marietti, CEO and Co-Founder of Kong Inc. "A unified platform like Konnect solves this by managing APIs in one place, provisioning credentials automatically, and making them agent-ready."

In fact, AI Integration complexity was cited as the top barrier to adoption (31%), followed by security and compliance concerns (28%). Yet the majority of enterprises are already taking steps to mitigate these issues, with 89% reporting that they either have AI governance in place or are actively seeking solutions. Of those with governance frameworks, 54% rely on an AI gateway, an emerging "middleware" enterprise control plane for managing AI traffic, policies, and compliance. 

The report examines the rate of adoption of agentic AI, including the opportunities and limitations for businesses. To gather these insights, a survey was commissioned of a representative sample of 550 Kong users, developers, engineers and IT decision-makers. 

You can view the full report from Kong here.