Published in 2026. This article examines developments from 2024 to 2026.
Introduction
Enterprise AI adoption between 2024 and 2026 was defined less by which companies announced the flashiest Generative AI demos and more by which categories of software actually got bought, deployed, and — in a few visible cases — acquired outright by larger platforms. This article traces that shift across three areas: robotic process Automation absorbing AI-native document and Agent capabilities, the governed-platform layer represented by companies like C3 AI and Dataiku, and the newer category of AI-powered workplace assistants and Enterprise Search, where one of the period’s most notable acquisitions took place.
RPA becomes agentic automation
UiPath, founded by Daniel Dines in Bucharest in 2005, is a useful bellwether for how robotic process automation evolved during this period. UiPath expanded its platform beyond classic UI-based bots into AI-powered Document Understanding and process mining earlier in the decade, and by 2025 was actively acquiring AI-native companies — including its purchase of Peak, a UK-based AI company, to add vertically specialized automation agents optimized for particular industries. Dines has publicly framed this shift as UiPath’s “Act II,” extending automation from deterministic, rules-based bots into agentic, AI-directed workflows that can handle exceptions and make bounded decisions rather than simply executing scripted steps. The company’s own leadership history during this window — Dines stepping back to a product-focused role in 2023, a co-CEO structure with Rob Enslin, and Dines’s return to sole CEO in early 2024 — also shows how volatile even a mature, publicly traded automation vendor’s executive structure can be while its underlying product strategy is being rebuilt around AI.
The governed platform layer holds its ground
While much of the 2024–2026 narrative centered on new generative AI point products, the governed-platform layer represented by C3 AI and Dataiku continued to serve large enterprises that need model governance, not just model access. C3 AI, founded by Thomas Siebel in 2009, saw its own leadership churn during the period: Siebel moved to Executive Chairman in September 2025 as Stephen Ehikian took over as CEO, then resumed the CEO role himself effective May 8, 2026, with Ehikian moving into a President position reporting to him — a sequence C3 AI disclosed through an SEC filing and its own earnings materials. Dataiku, led continuously by co-founder Florian Douetteau since its 2013 founding, took a steadier path, extending its existing MLOps and governance platform to cover generative AI workflows so that enterprises could connect large language models to internal data without abandoning the model-governance discipline they had already built around traditional machine learning. The contrast between C3 AI’s leadership volatility and Dataiku’s founder continuity is itself a useful data point for buyers evaluating platform vendors’ stability.
Workplace assistants consolidate: the Moveworks acquisition
The clearest single consolidation event in enterprise AI during this period was ServiceNow’s acquisition of Moveworks, the enterprise AI assistant platform known for its Reasoning Engine and multi-step task automation across Slack, Teams, and ServiceNow itself. ServiceNow completed the acquisition on December 15, 2025, and by February 2026 had launched ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, combining Moveworks’ conversational AI and enterprise search with ServiceNow’s own automated workflows to serve what the company described as close to 200 million employees across its customer base. Notably, ServiceNow chose to keep Moveworks available as a standalone product rather than folding it entirely into the core platform, a decision that reflects how enterprise buyers still frequently want point solutions they can deploy independently of a broader platform commitment. The acquisition is a significant signal that large workflow platforms consider AI-native assistant technology valuable enough to buy rather than build, even after years of in-house AI investment.
Enterprise search and governed generative AI
Two companies illustrate the narrower but fast-growing category of enterprise search and governed generative AI content. Glean, founded by former Google engineer Arvind Jain, provides permissions-aware retrieval and generative answers across an organization’s existing SaaS tools, letting employees search across documents, tickets, and chat history as if it were a single unified knowledge base rather than dozens of disconnected applications each with their own search box. Writer, founded by May Habib, takes a different approach, offering a full-stack generative AI platform built around its own Palmyra language models along with governance and brand-style controls aimed at marketing and operations teams that need generated content to stay on-brand and compliant. Both companies reflect a broader theme in the 2024–2026 period: enterprises increasingly wanted generative AI wrapped in permissions, audit trails, and style guardrails rather than raw access to a general-purpose chat interface.
What enterprises are actually buying
Put together, the pattern across these companies suggests enterprise AI adoption in this period was less about replacing existing software categories and more about layering AI capability onto workflows that already existed: automation platforms like UiPath added agentic reasoning to existing bots, data platforms like Dataiku added generative AI support to existing MLOps pipelines, and IT service management platforms like ServiceNow bought their way into conversational AI rather than building a comparable Reasoning Engine from scratch. For enterprise buyers, this suggests the most durable AI investments are ones that extend a system already embedded in daily workflows, rather than standalone tools that require employees to change how they work entirely.
How founder-led companies handled the transition differently
The 2024–2026 period is also a useful natural experiment in how founder-led enterprise software companies respond to the pressure of an AI platform shift. Daniel Dines at UiPath chose to step back from sole CEO duties in 2023 to focus on product direction, brought in an outside co-CEO, and then returned to the top role in early 2024 once that arrangement did not work as intended — a reversal he was able to make because he remained the company’s largest shareholder and board influence. Thomas Siebel at C3 AI followed a similar arc in miniature: stepping back to Executive Chairman in September 2025, then resuming the CEO role directly in May 2026 rather than continuing to operate through an outside CEO. Florian Douetteau at Dataiku, by contrast, never handed off the CEO role at all during this period, giving Dataiku a steadier public narrative even as its product strategy evolved substantially underneath that continuity. None of these approaches is obviously superior, but the contrast is instructive: enterprise software buyers evaluating any of these vendors during this period were, whether they realized it or not, also evaluating how much governance volatility they were willing to tolerate from a vendor’s leadership.
Budget reality behind the adoption headlines
It is worth being direct about what “adoption” meant in practice for many of the companies discussed here: expansion of existing contracts and selective new-logo wins within specific departments, rather than wall-to-wall organizational replacement of prior tools. UiPath’s agentic automation additions, for example, were positioned as extensions to existing automation estates rather than replacements for them, and Dataiku’s generative AI workflow support was pitched to existing MLOps customers as an added capability within a platform they already paid for. This matters for how the period should be read: the enterprise AI adoption story of 2024–2026 was substantially a story of incumbent enterprise software vendors extending their existing footprint with AI capability, rather than a wholesale changeover to a new generation of AI-native vendors displacing them outright.
Conclusion
From 2024 to 2026, enterprise AI adoption matured from scattered pilots into decisions with real budget and organizational consequences — visible most clearly in ServiceNow’s acquisition of Moveworks, C3 AI’s leadership reshuffle and Siebel’s return to the CEO seat, and UiPath’s acquisition-driven push into agentic automation. Readers tracking this space should watch UiPath, C3 AI, Dataiku, Moveworks, Glean, and Writer not as competitors in a single category, but as evidence of how differently automation, governed data platforms, and workplace assistants are each absorbing AI on their own terms, and of how much a vendor’s leadership stability shaped its adoption story just as much as its product roadmap did.