software PM market analysis — 2026-08-30

Enterprise software spending on AI is shifting from pilots to operationalisation. NVIDIA’s enterprise survey finds budgets increasingly directed at optimising workflows already in production and finding further practical use cases, rather than funding fresh experiments. Wharton’s analysis frames the productivity opportunity narrowly, tying it to how much of a given occupation’s work AI can actually complete or support, which keeps the upside conditional rather than assured.

Menlo Ventures notes that adoption is often starting with individual employees and teams, ahead of formal procurement. That grassroots pattern can widen usage quickly, but it still has to clear governance, security and budget approval before it shows up as durable vendor revenue. Forrester’s read on recent enterprise software earnings points the same way: vendors are testing consumption-based and usage-linked AI pricing alongside standard licences, a sign that monetisation approaches remain unsettled even as usage grows.

Taken together, the evidence supports continued AI-linked spending in software, but the path from usage to contracted revenue is not yet uniform, and implementation complexity in more advanced automation could slow adoption at organisations with limited engineering capacity.