Nearly 78% of organisations expect agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems to directly handle customer support interactions within the next 18 months, despite only 16% having deployed the technology organisation-wide.
This highlights a widening gap between corporate AI ambitions and operational readiness, according to Adobe's 2026 AI and Digital Trends Report.
The report, based on a survey of 3,000 customer experience executives and practitioners and 4,000 consumers globally, found businesses are rapidly shifting focus from generative AI tools that create content to agentic AI systems capable of making decisions and executing tasks with limited human intervention.
Companies expect AI agents to play a growing role across customer-facing functions, with 70% anticipating agentic AI will handle post-purchase support, 69% expecting it to manage sales interactions, 63% forecasting its use in account management, and 62% predicting deployment in customer engagement activities within the next 18 months.
However, the study found organisations remain poorly prepared for such large-scale adoption.
While 89% reported having cloud infrastructure to support genAI, only 51% said they possess similar capabilities for agentic AI. Just 39% have customer data platforms capable of supporting agentic AI initiatives.
Data remains the biggest obstacle. About 75% of respondents identified data integration and quality as the primary challenge in deploying agentic AI, while 52% said existing data structures already limit AI progress.
The report also pointed to a significant trust gap between businesses and consumers. While 49% of organisations believe customers will eventually prefer AI agents as their primary way of interacting with brands, only 19% of consumers agree.
Similarly, 36% of businesses believe customers will trust AI agents to make complex purchasing decisions, compared with just 21% of consumers.
Despite the readiness challenges, companies are reporting early gains from genAI adoption. Around 76% said AI has improved content production volumes, 69% reported higher employee productivity, and 65% linked the technology to revenue growth.
Adobe said the findings suggest the next phase of AI adoption will depend less on experimentation and more on building trusted data foundations, governance frameworks and customer confidence necessary to support autonomous AI systems at scale.
