The rise of 'agentic' in the enterprise workforce

Since the popularization of AI, enterprise employees have been told that they won't lose their jobs to the technology unless they refuse to use it.Now it appears that many enterprise employees are paying attention, and organizations are asking them about their use of AI.In SurveyMonkey’s Trends 2027 report, released on Tuesday, the SaaS survey platform vendor evaluated “millions of surveys” from more than 260,000 organizations globally. It found that most surveys from August 2025 to August 2026 included the words "Claude," "agentic," and "prompting." SurveyMonkey found that three in ten workers now use AI daily, and many AI users say AI makes their current job feel more secure and less likely to be eliminated.In this Q&A, Katie Miserany, SurveyMonkey’s chief communications officer, discusses what the upsurge in these AI buzzwords means for the enterprise work environment.Why would you say that the word "agentic" has increased in survey titles over the last year?Related:Anthropic maintains its focus on safety in IPO filingKatie Miserany: It really mirrors this evolution, where last year we saw a big 85% jump in the use of AI, which isn't surprising at all. Now you're seeing words like ‘agentic’ and ‘Claude’ and more specific terms that show how the industry is maturing. The general workforce is now incorporating these tools into their work more.In what way does this increase in the word "agentic" speak to the current working environment within enterprises?Miserany: There's a lot that we're seeing where it's moving from how you feel about AI to a lot more specific tools and ways of working. What you're seeing there, to editorialize a little bit, is businesses just really trying to figure out how to make this real and operational for their people. One of the things that's increased a ton during that same period is the number of skills-training surveys.So, employers send out surveys either about training they've done or to gather insight into what training people are looking for in the future. So that one was up 151%. AI tool access, specifically, is up 78%.You're seeing a lot of companies trying to dig into employees' appetite for these things, their aptitude and whether they have the skill set they need to operate in this agentic future. Specific tools are being thrown around, and employees feel they need different training or different support systems to get to where they need to be today.The way people work and think about work is also shifting. How is it changing?Miserany: One of the first two trends we noticed was HR shifting from culture-building to workforce readiness. At the same time, you're seeing all this skills training or questions about agentic; we saw the number of employee engagement surveys actually go down by 14%.Related:Inside the push to make workers trust and use AIIt's an interesting shift in focus too: do they have the tools, resources and training to participate right now? And then, across the overall corpus of surveys, there's less emphasis on employee experience and more on AI skills.The second trend we call ‘AI goes from unknown entity to everyday co-worker.’ And that's where you're seeing people use those terms. I'd never said "agentic" before, but now we say it at least once a week.You're seeing that mirrored in the survey data. AI is now your everyday co-worker, and you're being asked to interact with these tools on an ongoing basis.What does the increase in people using the word "agentic" also indicate how organizations and employees are thinking about investing in AI?Miserany: We have found that 32% of workers reconsidered the skills they were developing because of AI, and that number rose to 45% among those in school.People, either early in their careers or retooling for some reason, are very much invested in developing new skills because of the emergence of AI and the focus companies are placing on it right now.Related:Siemens, Nvidia deploy industrial AI to reduce engineering effortWhat does the significant uptick in mentions of Anthropic’s Claude reveal?Miserany: The mention of Claude specifically, which I think was like such a big topic, reflected the shift from ChatGPT to Claude last year. We saw mentions of that word up 736%.Claude was on the scene at the outset of last year, too. It's just that it has gone up dramatically. The other one that increased in that category was the word ‘prompting,’ which was up 116%.Company leaders are specifically asking about prompting in these surveys, which is fascinating. These are the skills now. ‘How good are you at prompting? Are you working with Claude? Do you understand what agentic technology is out there?’ It's just super fascinating to watch it shift like this.Editor’s note: This Q&A has been edited for clarity and conciseness.About the AuthorNews Writer, AI BusinessEsther Shittu has covered AI technologies and industry trends since 2021. As co-host of the Targeting AI podcast, she talks with experts, thought leaders and practitioners exploring critical AI developments. Before AI Business, she wrote for SearchEnterpriseAI, the New York Daily News, Bklyner and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. When she's not diving deep into the world of AI, she spends her time on passion projects and raising her three daughters.