Short answer: nobody knows exactly how AI will develop. What is clear: use is growing fast, AI can handle longer tasks, and the same performance keeps getting cheaper. Forecasts about jobs, agents and energy are just that, forecasts. This article keeps facts and expectations apart.
What we know
- Adoption. According to Statistics Netherlands (CBS), 33% of Dutch companies with ten or more employees used at least one AI technology in 2025, up from 23% in 2024 and 14% in 2023. The EU average was 20% (Eurostat).
- Longer tasks. METR found that the length of tasks AI agents complete half the time roughly doubled every seven months between 2019 and 2025, and faster since 2024. METR stresses that these are clean, well-defined software tasks.
- Falling prices. Epoch AI found that the price of reaching a fixed level of performance fell by a factor of 9 to 900 per year, depending on the task.
- Stanford AI Index 2026. Corporate AI investment reached 581.7 billion dollars in 2025. Robots still succeed at only 12% of ordinary household tasks.
What forecasters expect
- Gartner (June 2025): more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027.
- IMF (January 2024): almost 40% of jobs worldwide will be affected by AI, around 60% in advanced economies.
- ILO (May 2025): one in four jobs is potentially exposed to generative AI; transformation is more likely than job loss.
- IEA (April 2025): data centre electricity use is set to more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030 in its base case.
What is uncertain
Whether the trends continue, how well AI performs on messy real-world work, and whether there will be enough power and chips.
What does this mean for your business?
Start small with repetitive, well-defined work; keep a human in the loop; choose solutions that let you switch models later; and invest in your people's AI skills, which the EU AI Act already requires. See Five practical uses of AI for small businesses and The EU AI Act in brief.
As of October 2026. Figures and forecasts are updated regularly; check the current situation at the source.
Sources
- CBS (Statistics Netherlands): Digitalisering en kenniseconomie 2025, chapter 3, ICT use by companies (Dutch, 10 February 2026)
- Eurostat: 20% of EU enterprises use AI technologies (December 2025)
- METR: Time Horizon 1.1 (29 January 2026)
- METR: Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models (limitations of the measurement)
- Epoch AI: LLM inference prices have fallen rapidly but unequally across tasks (12 March 2025)
- Stanford HAI: Inside the AI Index, 12 Takeaways from the 2026 Report
- Gartner: Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027 (25 June 2025)
- IMF: AI Will Transform the Global Economy (14 January 2024)
- ILO: Generative AI and Jobs, A Refined Global Index of Occupational Exposure (May 2025)
- UN News: AI threatens one in four jobs, but transformation, not replacement, is the real risk (May 2025)
- IEA: Energy and AI, Executive summary (April 2025)
- AI Act Service Desk: Timeline for the implementation of the EU AI Act
Accessed 23 October 2026.