Small in dollars, vast in consequence
Three forecasters land within ten per cent of each other for 2030. Adoption is wide and shallow, failure rates are high, and machines already outnumber people inside the enterprise.
The 2030 convergence
AI agents market, US$ billions. Curves are implied by each firm's stated base and growth rate.
Wide, then shallow
Share of organisations, McKinsey State of AI 2025 (1,993 respondents, 105 countries).
109 machines for every human
Machine identities per human in the enterprise. 1 human, 79 AI agents, 29 other machine identities.
Up from 82 to 1 a year earlier. AI agents expected to grow 85% this year. 9 in 10 organisations had an identity-related breach in 12 months.
Gartner's double signal
Where agents are heading, and how many projects will not survive the trip.
Four quadrants, one verdict: demand is not the constraint, trust is
Every one of the 101 entries sits in one quadrant. Tap a quadrant to filter the explorer below.
OpenShell is the line. Sheaf works the signals.
NVIDIA OpenShell decides what an agent may reach, enforced at the kernel where the agent cannot argue. Sheaf proves whether what it is about to do adds up, and holds it when it does not.
Three agents on one mortgage file. No two of them disagree directly. Flip agent C and watch the signal.
One number, one risk, one fix
The pattern repeats in every sector: a dramatic gain in speed, a new category of risk, and a human who must still answer for the outcome.
Every agent needs a passport
Identity answers which software acted. Authorisation answers what it may do. Neither answers whether the decision was sound. A complete agent passport has seven pages. Tap a page to see which standard already stamps it.
Eighteen months that rewired the stack
The battlefield moved from the model to the runtime, the protocol and the payment rail.
The AI Agents 101
Players, protocols, case studies, data points, risks and moves, ranked by editorial atlas weight. Search, filter by quadrant, kind or industry, and open any entry for its source.
Five moves per audience, each inside one quarter
Tick them off. Your progress stays in this browser.
What class does your organisation fly?
Eight questions, thirty seconds. Your boarding pass shows how ready you are to let agents act in your name.
The players shaping the agent economy
Runtime and trust
NVIDIA · Sheaf · Cisco · CrowdStrike · Palo Alto Networks · Microsoft Security · TrendAI
Agent platforms
OpenAI · Anthropic · Google · Meta · Microsoft · ServiceNow · Salesforce · SAP
Payments and identity
Mastercard · Visa · Stripe · Fiserv · Backbase · PayPal · Shopify
Industries and builders
Allianz · State Farm · Epic · IQVIA · Netflix · Polsia · OpenClaw community
How this Atlas was built
Facts come from the sources below, as of 9 October 2026. Atlas weight and SWOT placement are Dinis Guarda's editorial judgement, not a market measure. Where a figure is a vendor's own claim, the entry says so.