New report of 550+ engineers finds daily AI agent use up 33 points in a year, as more than 9 in 10 engineers say agents have 'improved' or 'revolutionized' their productivity
Temporal, the open-source platform powering the world's most reliable agentic applications, today released 'The State of Development Report: AI Agents,' based on a survey of 550+ engineers and engineering leaders in the US and UK, which examines how engineering teams are deploying AI agents, where they're succeeding, and where deployments still break down. The second annual report points to a sharp acceleration in adoption paired with a widening gap between teams that have figured out how to use agents to effectively code and those still catching up.
Key findings from the 2026 report include:
- Adoption is accelerating: 80.8% of respondents now use AI agents daily or more, up from 47.3% a year ago, signaling a 70.8% relative increase.
- Teams are running more agents: The median respondent runs 5 agents, but the average is 10.7, with some respondents reporting well over 100.
- AI is revolutionizing productivity: 91.1% say agents have "improved" or "revolutionized" their productivity, and 85.5% trust agent outputs at least somewhat. Yet, 41.1% encounter agent-related issues daily or more, and 9.0% say "continuously," demonstrating that confidence in agents is outpacing their operational maturity.
- The idea cycle has shortened: 51.3% of engineers now go from AI prototype to production-ready code in hours or faster; 26.9% say minutes or faster.
- The SaaSpocalypse is real: 92.3% of engineers have tried to rebuild software they used to buy.
- Engineers are personally optimistic but split on the profession's future: About 77.5% of engineers say they're more optimistic about their own role than a year ago. At the same time, 56.7% believe it will be harder for junior engineers to find jobs, and 45.5% say the same for senior engineers, even though only 26.4% of companies report slowing or stopping hiring.
"Our second State of Development Report highlights how today's engineers have adopted AI agents faster than most teams have built the infrastructure to run them reliably," said Samar Abbas, co-founder and CEO of Temporal Technologies. "The data shows that the teams pulling ahead are those who trust their systems more, because they've solved for state, cost, and reliability. That's the layer we built Temporal to handle."
The survey was conducted from April 29 to May 25, 2026 and includes responses from over 550 software engineers, architects, infrastructure contributors, and engineering leaders worldwide. Respondents represented a mix of company sizes and roles, with two-thirds US-based and one-third UK/EMEA, spanning company sizes from under 50 to over 5,000 employees, with the largest concentration (29.2%) at companies with 251-1,000 employees. The most common roles were engineer/AI engineer (25.6%), followed by VP/director of IT (13.9%) and data engineer (11.9%).
The full report is available at https://temporal.io/reports/state-of-developement-2026
For more information on Temporal or a demo visit www.temporal.io. To learn more about open positions and career opportunities, please visit www.temporal.io/careers.
About Temporal Technologies
Temporal is changing how modern software is built through its open-source Durable Execution platform. By guaranteeing the execution of workflows even in the face of system failures, Temporal allows developers to focus entirely on business logic instead of developer plumbing for process crashes, infrastructure, and dependency failures-increasing developer velocity. Its polyglot capabilities allow seamless orchestration across multiple programming languages, making it ideal for both traditional enterprise applications and next-generation AI workloads. Temporal Cloud, the company's managed service backed by the originators of the project, has been adopted by thousands of leading enterprises. Learn more at www.temporal.io.
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