AI coding agents: measuring ROI before you scale them
Gartner's 2026 market guide for enterprise AI coding agents reports that 90% of engineering leaders see improvements from the tools, against a net average productivity gain of 19.3%. A separate Gartner analysis of technology adoption puts the share of software engineering leaders reporting significant ROI from AI across the development lifecycle at 35%. The distance between those figures is not a tooling failure. It is what happens when a team adopts agents without a pre-adoption baseline, budgets for them as seats while vendors move to usage-based pricing and expects acceleration in the parts of delivery that agents do not touch.
Tudor Iordache - 16 Sep 2026


