The share of AI builders using search infrastructure rose from 5% to 30% in a year, code sandboxes from 11% to 40% and browser infrastructure from 4% to 14%, Menlo Ventures found in 2026: The State of Enterprise AI, published on 3 November. By our arithmetic, search use rose six times over, the fastest gain among the six infrastructure categories Menlo charts.
Menlo says the report draws on a survey of nearly 400 U.S. enterprise decision-makers responsible for more than $4 billion in AI spending, fielded by Morning Consult from September 8 to 26, 2026. Its dollar figures are estimates of annualized run rate from “a bottoms-up model informed by survey responses, public filings, and third-party reports”. Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic and in infrastructure companies the report names, including Neon, Fireworks, Modal, Gimlet and OpenRouter.
A short Business Engineer explainer on the difference between an AI model and the harness around it. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Menlo’s report or any company in this piece.
The key insight: By our arithmetic, the share of AI builders using search infrastructure rose six times over in a year, from 5% to 30%, the fastest relative gain among the six infrastructure categories in Menlo Ventures’ 2026 report.
Menlo says “AI agents are becoming the standard way to build AI applications”. It adds: “Today, 74% of builders use agents to manage workflows and execute tasks, compared with 27% of startup deployments in 2025. Nearly a third (32%) are already using multiple agents working together”.
Its explanation of why infrastructure changes: “Agents operate differently: They work at machine speed, run in parallel, spinning up and discarding resources as needed”.
Menlo’s chart shows the share of AI builders using each category in 2025 and 2026. Databases rose 2 points to 91%, evals and observability 4 points to 84%, and orchestration 9 points to 54%.
The three newer categories moved further: code sandboxes rose 29 points to 40%, search 25 points to 30% and browser infrastructure 10 points to 14%. By our arithmetic, search went from 5% to 30%, six times its 2025 share.
Menlo describes the new categories as “Sandboxes (for coding agents to run untrusted code), search (for agents to retrieve information), and browser infrastructure (for personal agents to navigate the web)”.
Menlo says databases are “still the systems agents touch most (91% of AI apps)”, but are shifting “to high-volume, ephemeral ones that agents spin up, use, and discard for each task”.
It names Neon/Lakebase, Supabase, ClickHouse and Archil as the providers showing that shift most strongly. Its infrastructure market map, below, lists Exa, Perplexity, Parallel and Keenable under search, E2B and Daytona under sandboxes, and Browserbase, Kernel, TinyFish, Tavily and Firecrawl under browser infrastructure.
The framework argues that the AI economy “is a layered industrial stack โ and at any given moment, the binding constraint sits at a different layer than it did six months ago.”
As we read it, Menlo’s adoption chart shows new layers forming inside the tooling part of that stack, sandboxes, search and browsers, as agents take on more of the work. The framework is the owner’s argument and does not discuss Menlo’s report.
The adoption figures are shares of AI builders in Menlo’s research, not spend. The 74% agent figure is compared with 27% of startup deployments in 2025, a different base, as Menlo’s wording shows.
The market map is Menlo’s selection of companies, not a ranking by usage or revenue; orange outlines on it mark Menlo portfolio companies. Menlo invests in Anthropic and in several infrastructure companies it names.
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Menlo Ventures found that 30% of AI builders now use search infrastructure, up from 5%, 40% use code sandboxes, up from 11%, and 14% use browser infrastructure, up from 4%. By our arithmetic, search adoption rose six times over, the fastest of the six categories Menlo charts.
A note on sourcing. The figures, chart data and quotes come from Menlo Ventures’ report 2026: The State of Enterprise AI, published on 3 November 2026, and the charts shown are Menlo’s own. Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic and in several companies named here. The one figure labelled our arithmetic is calculated from Menlo’s numbers. We did not contact Menlo or the companies named.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
