External signal·Andreessen Horowitz·Apr 8, 2026·Kimberly Tan·15 min read
Where Enterprises are Actually Adopting AI
“Coding is the dominant use case for AI by nearly an order of magnitude.”
Summary
a16z pushes back on the widely cited MIT claim that 95% of generative-AI pilots fail, using its own data: 29% of the Fortune 500 and roughly 19% of the Global 2000 are now live, paying customers of a leading AI startup — top-down contracts that converted from pilot to production. Adoption concentrates in three horizontal use cases — coding (an order-of-magnitude outlier), customer support, and search — and three industries: tech, legal, and healthcare. Kimberly Tan argues these domains share the traits that make AI work: text-based, repetitive, human-in-the-loop, lightly regulated, and verifiable outputs. Overlaying revenue momentum against OpenAI's GDPval benchmark, she shows model capability climbing fast (accounting/auditing up roughly 20 points and police/detective work up nearly 30 points in four months) and concludes AI is "coming for all markets," with the main brakes being the physical world, interpersonal relationships, coordination costs, regulation, and a lack of verifiable results.
Predictions for the future of work
The work implications are function-specific. Coding and customer support see the deepest near-term automation and augmentation — portfolio engineers' productivity reportedly up 10-20x, and support (a high-volume, entry-level, often-outsourced BPO function) A/B-tests favorably against agents on tickets answered, resolution rate, and CSAT. Legal and healthcare back-office work — document review, medical scribing — compresses next. As long-horizon agents, computer use, and spreadsheet/financial workflows mature, Tan expects new breakout categories, implying continued erosion of routine, verifiable knowledge tasks while non-automatable, judgment-heavy and relationship-bound work rises in relative value as the new bottleneck.
Originally published by Andreessen Horowitz · Apr 8, 2026
Read the original at Andreessen Horowitz