July 2026 State of AI Report: The Builder's Economy How 300+ Executives Are Scaling AI Products

AI product companies are moving from proving that AI works to building economically durable businesses, with application depth, pricing, cost control, and organizational design becoming decisive.

• The study analyzes an anonymous Q2 2026 survey of approximately 305 executives and compares it with a Q4 2025 survey of approximately 300 executives, including CEOs and product, engineering, and AI leaders.
• Nearly two-thirds of builders are developing horizontal or vertical applications, with vertical AI representing 43% of respondents; data analytics and business intelligence rank first among use cases, while financial services and healthcare have risen in priority.
• Customer-facing products are designed for recurring use: 60% are used daily and 24% several times per week, while agentic capabilities and agent reliability or orchestration are the top investment priorities for the next 12 months.
• Companies use about 3.3 model providers on average, up from 3.1 in Q4 2025; Anthropic’s adoption rose from 51% to 81%, while licensed third-party APIs remained the leading model type and open-source adoption increased.
• AI products’ share of revenue is projected to rise from 32% in 2025 to 42% in 2026, with gross margins increasing from 45% to 53% and potentially reaching approximately 59% in 2027; consumption- and outcome-based pricing account for 42% and 23% respectively.

Takeaway: Investors should focus on AI businesses that embed deeply into specialized workflows and align pricing with usage and value, while assessing model dependence, enterprise controls, observability, security, and the still-uncertain cost of internal AI deployment.