AI Agents are just a trend, right?
Real People Network wants to let you know that AI Agents are not just a trend that will go away. Courtesy of Digital Ocean marketing, we share the following:
“Trend Watch: DigitalOcean's February 2026 Currents report findings
At DigitalOcean, we’re tracking how digital-native enterprises are using the latest AI technologies—from OpenAI's APIs to open-source models like Llama—to build the next generation of applications. It’s fascinating to understand how companies are deploying AI, and this understanding also informs how we’re expanding our own DigitalOcean GradientTM AI inference cloud to help customers scale AI applications affordably.
Our latest research is documented in our February 2026 Currentsreport, which gathers data from over 1,100 developers, CTOs, and technology founders. We focused on the direct challenges they’re facing with AI implementation and whether businesses are seeing real ROI from AI.
So, what exactly did we find?
Inference is the top cost inhibitor for AI at scale. Forty-nine percent of respondents identified the high cost of inference as a challenge, and nearly half (44%) report spending the majority of their AI budget on inference rather than training.
AI agents aren’t a fleeting use case—they’re the future. A majority (60%) of respondents considered “applications and agents” to provide the most long-term, future-proof value in their AI tech stack. It’s also the top-ranked spending area for AI budgets in the next year.
Agents bring ROI to organizations. Fifty-three percent of companies using AI agents have observed productivity/time savings for employees, and 44% of respondents report the creation of new business capabilities as a direct outcome of using AI agents.
Developer focus is on integration, not model training. Only 15% of respondents stated that they’re taking the time to train AI models from scratch. Instead, 64% of respondents are integrating third-party AI APIs into applications, and 61% are using a hybrid or niche tools approach rather than a single integrated stack.
Our report also breaks down the shift from training to inference, why single-provider setups are rare, and how teams are managing reliability and human oversight as they move agents into production.
Plus, we share our take on what these findings mean for the industry and how DigitalOcean is building infrastructure to address the costs and complexity that are holding teams back from scaling.
Get all the data from the February 2026 Currents report.