KPMG: AI Agents Will Be 36% of Tech Teams in Two Years. Will You Be Directing Them or Competing With Them?
KPMG's Global Tech Report 2026 predicts AI agents will make up over a third of core technology teams within two years. The real disruption isn't mass layoffs — it's who ends up managing the AI and who ends up managed by it.
// executive_summary
- KPMG's Global Tech Report 2026 (2,500 execs, 27 countries) predicts AI agents will be 36% of core tech teams within two years.
- Most firms expect only modest human headcount reductions — the highest-performing firms keep investing in people alongside AI, not instead of it.
- In India specifically, 74% of CEOs in KPMG's 2025 India CEO Outlook say AI workforce readiness will significantly affect growth prospects.
- Human roles64 · 64%
- AI agents36 · 36%
Source: KPMG, Global Tech Report 2026
Key Finding
The disruption is structural, not headcount
The real shift isn't mass layoffs — it's a third of every 'team' not being human, requiring someone to direct and review that work.
KPMG's Global Tech Report 2026, based on a survey of 2,500 technology executives across 27 countries, makes a prediction sharper than most: AI assistants and agents will make up 36% of core technology teams within two years. Most organizations surveyed expect only modest reductions in permanent human roles — the disruption KPMG describes isn't primarily mass layoffs, it's the emergence of teams where a third of the "headcount" isn't human.
Why this is a different kind of disruption
A team that's more than a third AI agents needs a different structure than a team of only humans — someone has to decide what those agents work on, review their output, and integrate their work with the humans still on the team. KPMG's own finding backs this: the highest-performing companies in its survey are continuing to invest in people alongside AI, rather than simply substituting one for the other. The winning pattern isn't fewer people, it's a different relationship between people and AI on the same team.
The two roles that emerge
- The person directing AI agents — deciding scope, reviewing quality, and catching the mistakes an agent won't catch on its own.
- The person being managed alongside AI agents — doing work that's increasingly benchmarked against what an agent could have done instead.
- KPMG's India-specific data reinforces the stakes: 74% of CEOs in its 2025 India CEO Outlook said AI workforce readiness will significantly affect their organization's growth prospects over the next three years.
The way forward
In two years, working alongside AI agents on a team won't be a novelty — it'll be the default. The people who benefit from that shift are the ones who already have practice deciding what an AI agent should do and checking its work, not the ones encountering that dynamic for the first time when their own team restructures around it. That practice starts the same way it always does: by actually using AI to build or automate something real, before your job requires it of you.
Way Forward
Way Forward
Get practice now deciding what an AI agent should do and checking its output — on any real workflow you can. That's the skill that separates directing agents from being benchmarked against them.