Snyk report links agentic AI uptake to executive pressure
Snyk's third State of Agentic AI report finds that while half of enterprises use agentic development, top-down leadership is the primary driver. The shift is accelerating as security leaders embrace the technology to counter agentic threats.
Snyk's State of Agentic AI in the Enterprise report, now in its third volume, indicates that while 100% of enterprises use AI, only 50% to 60% have moved beyond co-pilot style assistance to agentic development. Nair identified leadership and culture as the primary drivers for this transition, citing examples of CEOs using agents on weekends to accelerate adoption timelines. He noted that a rollout of 50,000 Cloud Code agents, initially planned for August, was pulled in to July 10th due to top-down pressure. Nair argued that top-down executive pressure is the most effective propellant for enterprise agentic adoption, overcoming the typical slow pace of change in large organizations. The report found that OpenAI was the most used model for building in January, but Anthropic closed the gap by the second report. Nair observed that CISOs are no longer slow to adopt, often driving change due to agentic attacker threats. He highlighted a shift in responsibility, with AI-native organizations viewing security risk as a shared organizational burden rather than an individual developer liability. This cultural shift is enabling faster adoption of agentic workflows, although many large banks still run agents in confined, sandboxed environments without internet access to mitigate risk.