Agentic coding tools are starting to change how companies shop for software. In McKinsey's State of AI 2026 report, published September 1, 32 percent of organizations said they had decided against buying at least one off-the-shelf product or feature because they could build it internally with AI coding agents.
Who is building
The shift is strongest in technology companies, where 41 percent reported skipping a purchase, followed by healthcare payers and providers at 39 percent and professional services and energy at 38 percent each. Financial institutions came in at 36 percent.
It is also concentrated among what McKinsey calls high performers, the 6 percent of respondents who attribute at least 5 percent of their earnings before interest and taxes to AI. Nearly half of that group has bypassed a software purchase, compared with 31 percent of everyone else. Among large enterprises with more than $1 billion in revenue, 40 percent are now scaling agents in at least one function, up from 27 percent.
McKinsey senior partner Lieven Van der Veken said leaders are increasingly asking what their organizations need in order to build AI tools themselves.
The catch
The financial payoff has not followed. The share of organizations reporting that AI contributed to EBIT sat at 37 percent, unchanged from a year earlier. Analysts covering the report pointed out that coding agents compress initial development, which is roughly 30 percent of a system's lifetime cost, and do little for the other 70 percent spent on maintenance, security, integration drift and eventual replacement.
Other research cited alongside the findings is sobering:
- MIT NANDA research found internally built AI systems succeed about 33 percent of the time, versus roughly 67 percent for vendor tools.
- Gartner predicts more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027.
- A June 2026 Forrester survey found 75 percent adoption but only a small minority of agents in production.
The workforce is watching too: 39 percent of employees expect job cuts next year, up from 32 percent a year earlier, and one in five organizations reported feeling the pinch of AI operating costs.
Source: Yahoo Finance, Startup Fortune
Photo: Joonspoon · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
