Nearly a third of firms are skipping software buys to build with coding agents

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Thursday, September 3, 2026

Confidence

High · — primary research with full methodology; EBIT figure flat YoY caveat

Evidence

McKinsey primary survey (n=1,719) + corroborating analysis

McKinsey's State of AI 2026 finds that 32% of organizations have decided against buying one or more software products because they could be built internally with agentic coding tools .

The details

Large-enterprise agent scaling rose from 27% to 40% year-over-year; smaller firms flat at 22%.
Only 37% of firms report any EBIT impact from AI, unchanged, n=1,719.

What it means

The build-vs-buy line moved for internal admin apps, reporting layers, and workflow glue — not systems of record. Vendors selling in that tier need a new answer to 'why not have Claude Code write it?' by next renewal.

McKinsey's State of AI 2026 finds that 32% of organizations have decided against buying one or more software products because they could be built internally with agentic coding tools .

Large-enterprise agent scaling rose from 27% to 40% year-over-year; smaller firms flat at 22%.
Only 37% of firms report any EBIT impact from AI, unchanged, n=1,719.

Sources

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Stat of the Day

32%

McKinsey State of AI 2026

Share of organizations that skipped buying at least one software product because agentic coding tools let them build it in-house. Source

Today’s Take

Today's five stories are one story told from five desks: agents crossed from demo to operations without the institutions catching up. Meta had to unwind a performance system that measured the wrong thing; CISA had to codify a threat class that shouldn't have reached production; CrowdStrike had to invent a benchmark because none existed; a third of buyers are already routing around the software they used to purchase; and Uber is negotiating with unions it spent a decade fighting. The pattern isn't hype — it's a policy vacuum being filled in real time, badly, by whoever owns the incident. Considered and passed: the Kirkland–Palantir $500M legal AI build (June news recycled today, no new development) and the Hugging Face/NVIDIA Open Data for Agents release (self-reported 40% benchmark lift, no independent reproduction).

— Agentic desk

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