Platform research · Digital.ai
State of Agile 2025: 84% Use AI, 49% Have Governance
Digital.ai's 18th State of Agile, the direct successor to the VersionOne State of Agile series, finds AI use across Agile teams has jumped from 68% to 84% in a single year, while governance guardrails sit at just 49%. Proving ROI is now the dominant pressure: 76% of practitioners cite rising scrutiny on the business value of Agile work.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 84% AI adoption rate among Agile practitioners in 2025, up from 68% the year before. The fastest single-year jump since the survey began.
- 76% Cite increased scrutiny on the business impact and ROI of Agile work. Only half of those feel they can deliver reliably against that scrutiny.
- 49% Have governance guardrails in place for AI use inside Agile delivery. Adoption is outrunning oversight by 35 percentage points.
- 73% Want stronger leadership support and clearer alignment between delivery work and business goals.
- 74% Use hybrid or blended Agile models (combining Scrum, SAFe, Kanban and others) rather than a single framework.
- 79% Say their teams are doing more work with the same or fewer resources, the 'do more with less' headline of the 2025 edition.
- 41% Have increased Agile spending in the past two years, despite the squeeze on team resources.
- 29% Of Agile leaders are accountable for connecting team work to business outcomes.
- 26% Of Agile leaders influence product or portfolio planning decisions.
- 52% Track customer satisfaction as a primary measure of Agile success.
- 40% Track efficiency or cost reduction as a primary measure of Agile success.
- >25% Are already experimenting with agentic AI systems that act autonomously inside the delivery lifecycle.
What the report covers
The 18th State of Agile report, published by Digital.ai in October 2025, surveys nearly 350 Agile practitioners (predominantly coaches and consultants working inside enterprises with 20,000 or more employees) on how Agile software delivery is changing as AI moves from experiment to production. The study is the direct successor to the VersionOne State of Agile series, which has run continuously since 2006 and is the longest-published longitudinal benchmark in the field.
The 2025 edition frames AI as the start of a 'fourth wave' of software delivery, after the original framework wave (Scrum, XP), the scaling wave (SAFe, LeSS) and the value-stream wave (DevOps and VSM). The fourth wave is defined by AI moving from a supporting tool to an orchestrator across the lifecycle: requirements, code, test, deploy and feedback. Adoption is now the majority position at 84%, but the central tension of the report is that governance, leadership alignment and ROI accountability are all lagging the speed at which AI is being introduced.
What this means for UK marketers
For UK B2B marketers selling into enterprise software, IT or operations functions, the 84% AI adoption number is now the wallpaper, not the story. The story is the 35-point gap between adoption and governance: a third of organisations have brought AI into Agile work without a guardrail framework. That is where the live buying conversations are happening.
If you sell software, consulting or services to enterprise delivery teams, the messaging shift is from 'here is our AI capability' (the buyer already has one) to 'here is how we operate inside your governance constraints' (the buyer has not solved that). Case studies that show how a vendor's AI sits inside an existing risk register, audit trail or change-control process now carry more weight than feature parity benchmarks. Lead with operational evidence, not capability claims. The same theme runs through BCG's split-decisions survey of CEOs and boards on AI: enterprise buyers want execution credibility, not vision slides.
For UK SMB and mid-market sellers, the ROI-scrutiny finding is the more relevant signal. 76% of practitioners are now under pressure to prove the business impact of Agile, and only half feel they can do so reliably. That is a direct content opportunity: practical templates, scorecards and ROI calculators for Agile and digital transformation work tend to outperform thought-leadership essays in this climate. Pages and posts that help a buyer build the internal business case (rather than read an opinion about it) will earn the link, the share and the meeting. We work this exact angle on our UK digital marketing services for B2B clients.
Two practical reads. First, the 41% spending increase combined with 79% 'doing more with less' tells you that budgets are flowing, but only to vendors who can defend a productivity story. Generic creative work is being squeezed; measurable performance work is not. Second, the agentic AI experimentation (above 25%) is a genuine 2026 leading indicator. Brands selling into the enterprise software stack should be planning content and demand generation against an audience that is no longer just buying AI features, it is starting to govern autonomous workflows.
How they got the data
The 18th State of Agile report is based on a 2025 survey of nearly 350 respondents, predominantly Agile coaches and consultants working inside large enterprises (typically 20,000 or more employees). Digital.ai positions this respondent base as the population most likely to have visibility across multiple delivery teams and frameworks, rather than a single squad. The report is published annually and is the direct continuation of the VersionOne State of Agile series, which began in 2006. That makes it the longest-running longitudinal study of Agile adoption in the industry.
The sample size is modest by survey standards, so findings should be read as directional signals from senior practitioners rather than precise market shares. Geographic and industry breakdowns are not detailed in the headline release. The report's strength is its year-on-year comparability across nearly two decades of consistent question wording, particularly on framework adoption, scaling approach and now AI tooling.
Platform research
Read the full report
From Digital.ai · published 28/10/2025