All indications are that 2026 will be the year of agentic artificial intelligence (AI), succinctly defined as generative AI that can accomplish real-world tasks rather than simply outputting content.
Agentic AI is already playing a key role in next-generation automation within companies, increasing productivity and reducing costs. According to Phocuswright’s latest research report, Budgets, Barriers and the Race to Agentic AI, more than 60% of travel businesses surveyed are experimenting with or scaling agentic AI, with 6% already actively scaling and 22% beginning to scale.
Concurrently, agentic commerce, defined as AI agents finding, comparing and potentially making purchases online for customers, is gaining traction among consumers.
Many developments in 2025 set the stage for agentic AI to move to the forefront for both businesses and travelers in 2026, arguably the most impactful being the launch and extraordinarily rapid adoption of model context protocol (MCP), a universal, open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. Over half of companies surveyed are already exploring or implementing emerging agentic AI interoperability standards like MCP and Agent2Agent.
Last year also saw the launch and maturation of a plethora of agentic business automation tools and the announcement of mainstream agentic consumer offerings from Google, OpenAI, Stripe, Visa and others.
After a year of hype, gen AI has moved firmly into execution mode for the travel industry, reshaping how companies think about technology investment, product development and competitive advantage.
Phocuswright's Budgets, Barriers and the Race to Agentic AI
Based on a global survey of senior travel executives, the full report examines where generative AI and agentic AI are already delivering value, how budgets are shifting to support them and what’s holding organizations back from scaling. As agentic AI gains traction, the competitive divide is increasingly defined by who can move from experimentation to infrastructure.