The quick version:
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Gartner expects 40 percent of enterprise apps to include agentic AI by the end of 2026, up from under 1 percent in 2024.
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Every agent that browses the web live needs proxy infrastructure that looks like a real person.
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Bright Data reportedly hit 300 million dollars in ARR in late 2025, up from 100 million in 2021, driven by AI demand.
Why agents change the math
Old scraping was batch work, run a crawler and process later. Agents work live. One booking travel browses airline sites and fills forms in real time. One doing research opens tabs and follows links as it reasons. Each needs to reach the open web without being blocked.
The market is repricing
When the biggest player triples revenue on the back of AI data needs, that is not hype, that is the market shifting. The proxy customer is changing from a scraper or marketer to an autonomous agent acting for a business.
My take
The companies positioning for agent traffic now, rather than chasing the old bulk scraping crowd, are the ones who will look smart in two years.
I have argued this on X more than once, the demand curve is bending toward trust and uptime, not the cheapest gigabyte.
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