Agentic AI has overtaken generative AI on S&P 500 earnings calls: what 5,305 transcripts show

I counted AI vocabulary on 5,305 earnings calls held by current S&P 500 companies since January 2024, using speaker-by-speaker transcripts. The short version: executives have mostly stopped saying "generative AI" and started saying "agentic".

Each full quarter has 461 to 487 calls; October is only the first 78 calls of the season. The full quarterly series, with charts, is in the study on Equibles.

Five things I didn't expect

1. It's a management word, not an analyst word. On calls held from July to September 2026, company speakers said "agentic" 371 times and analysts 46 times. On 83 of the 97 calls that used it, an executive said it first.

2. DeepSeek was the opposite. It came up on 53 calls (11.2%) in January to March 2025, the highest share any AI developer reached until OpenAI hit 11.6% a year later. An analyst raised it first on 31 of those 53 calls. By July to September 2026 it was on none.

3. Anthropic has nearly caught OpenAI. In early 2024, OpenAI or ChatGPT was named on 17 calls and Anthropic or Claude on 5. Last quarter it was 40 to 31 (8.4% vs 6.5% of calls), and on the October calls so far it's 5 each.

4. It spread well beyond software. Technology companies used "agentic" on 53% of their calls last quarter. Consumer staples went from 1 call a year earlier to 8 of 31 (Walmart, Target, Costco, Dollar General and others), and real estate from 1 to 6 of 27, mostly data center owners. Energy, utilities and materials: zero, even though most energy calls mention AI.

5. "Agentic commerce" is a payments story. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Global Payments and Coinbase use the phrase. When an analyst asked Costco about it, the CFO said he wasn't sure he'd call it that.

The phrase it replaced is fading fast: "generative AI" was said 459 times in January to March 2024 and 40 times in July to September 2026. Of the 79 companies that said it on a call in mid-2024, 76 held a call in the same months of 2026, and 40 of those said "agentic" while 17 still said "generative AI".

How I counted, and the traps

• Case-insensitive whole words, one call per company per fiscal quarter, longest transcript kept, calls under 1,500 words dropped.
• Speech recognition spells the new word several ways. "Agentic" includes "agentec", "agentech", "a gentic", and "a genetic" only when the next word is AI, commerce, workflows or similar. Without that condition you also count "a genetic disease".
• "Claude" counts only with an AI term within about 90 characters. FedEx's interim CFO is named Claude, and so was a Norfolk Southern board member in 2024.
• "Gemini" doesn't count on Alphabet's own calls, "Copilot" not on Microsoft's, "Llama" not on Meta's.
• Speaker roles come from the transcripts; 52 of the 469 "agentic" mentions last quarter had no identified speaker.
• Two transcription sources cover different years. In the quarters where both were common, they gave nearly the same shares (11.7% vs 12.0% for "agentic" in July to September 2025), so I don't think the trend is an artifact.

Run it on one company

The single-company version is a phrase count across that company's calls. I walked through it for Microsoft and "agents" in an earlier post. With the Equibles MCP server connected, a prompt like "Using Equibles, how often has Visa said 'agentic' on its last eight earnings calls?" does it in one tool call.

The full write-up has the sector breakdown, the 13 companies that say it most (Adobe leads with 27 mentions on one call), quotes linked to each call, and the methodology: Agentic AI Has Overtaken Generative AI on Earnings Calls: Evidence From 5,305 S&P 500 Calls.