The vocabulary moves first, and it moves fast
We counted every SEC filing using the phrase agentic AI. It went from one filing to eight hundred a quarter in under two years. That curve measures how quickly language spreads through disclosure, and it should not be mistaken for anything else.
- One filing to the SEC used the phrase agentic AI in the second quarter of 2024. Two years later a single quarter carried 815, and the all-forms total was 2,505 when this was written in July 2026.
- The curve measures how fast a term becomes obligatory in lawyered disclosure. It is not an adoption curve, not a capability curve, and not a count of companies.
- Split out annual reports and the shape inverts, because 10-Ks land in the first quarter. Read that column down the years rather than across the quarters.
- Language arrives well ahead of practice. Prepare for the questions on the early timeline and the capability on the late one, and do not confuse the two projects.
In the second quarter of 2024, exactly one filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission contained the phrase agentic AI. By the fourth quarter of 2025 it was three hundred and twenty three. In the second quarter of 2026 it was eight hundred and fifteen. The full count across every form type stands at two thousand five hundred and five.
We counted these ourselves, from EDGAR full-text search, and published the method and the raw file. The numbers are not the interesting part. What they measure is.
Three things this curve is not
It is not an adoption curve. A filing mentions a phrase; it does not deploy anything. A meaningful share of these mentions sit in risk factors, where the sentence is closer to our competitors may use this against us than to any claim about the filer.
It is not a capability curve. Nothing changed about what the systems could do between one filing and three hundred. What changed was that a term became available, then expected, and eventually conspicuous by its absence.
It is not a company count. The same filer appears repeatedly across quarterly and annual filings, so the curve overstates breadth. We count filings because filings are what the source counts, and pretending otherwise would require a de-duplication step we would then have to defend.
What it does measure
It measures the speed at which a term becomes obligatory in formal disclosure. That is a real and useful quantity, because disclosure language is expensive. Filings are lawyered. A phrase entering eight hundred of them in a quarter means eight hundred sets of counsel concluded the term was standard enough to use without explanation.
The gap between that and actual practice is where the operator lives. When your board asks whether you are doing agentic AI, they have most likely encountered the term in exactly this way, and the honest answer involves asking what they mean before answering.
The seasonality tells its own story
Split out annual reports and the shape changes completely. The 10-K series sits in single and double digits through 2025, then jumps to one hundred and ninety in the first quarter of 2026, because that is when annual reports land. Read that column down the years rather than across the quarters or you will invent a collapse that is just the calendar.
This is the ordinary hazard of published indices, and the reason we show the method rather than only the chart. A number without its shape is a number you can be misled by, including by us.
How to use it
Treat the vocabulary curve as a leading indicator of pressure rather than of practice. When a term goes vertical in disclosure, the questions arrive shortly afterwards, from boards, from customers in procurement questionnaires, and from your own staff who read the same coverage.
Being ready for the question is a different project from being ready for the technology, it takes a fraction of the time, and confusing the two is how programmes end up building something nobody asked for in order to answer something anyone could have answered in a paragraph.
The language arrives about eighteen months before the practice. Plan for the questions on the early timeline and the capability on the late one.