CrewAI research newsletter

View in browser Hi there, Every week, someone asks us the same question. “What are the other companies actually using Crew AI for?” Outside the demos, and launch videos. The real stuff, running inside real companies on a random Tuesday. It’s a fair question. Most of what you read about agents is either a prediction or a pitch. But we have an unfair advantage. Every time someone builds an agent on CrewAI, it leaves a trail. Over time, that trail added up to about 56,500 distinct builds, which ran more than 307 million times. So we went through all of it. We grouped every build into 208 use cases, and 23 categories, and three big buckets. In this edition: What are people actually building? Is a build the same as an agent that gets used? What’s inside each bucket? What jobs are these agents really doing? Why do some agents survive and others don’t? Where should your first agent go? First, The Big Picture Let’s classify every build into 3 buckets: Back office: the work that keeps the company running. Documents, data, IT, compliance, HR, finance. 23,000 builds. Front office: anything that faces a customer or the market. Marketing, sales, chat assistants, competitor research. 10,700 builds. Other: everything that fits neither. Software engineering, research, personal tools, healthcare, education. 22,800 builds. But there is one number that should stop you. Only about 7% of these builds stick. Out of 56,500, roughly 4,100 are still being used. So the better question than ‘what people are building’ is what is surviving. Is a Build the Same as an Agent That Works? Not even close. Count builds, and back office barely leads, with 41% against 40% for Other. Count runs, and it’s a different picture. Back office accounts for 59% of every run on the platform. The average back office build runs about 7,800 times. The average front office or Other build runs about 3,800. The boring agents work twice as hard. It makes sense once you see it. An agent that reads invoices runs every time an invoice arrives. An agent that writes a blog post runs when someone remembers to ask it. So What’s Inside Each Bucket? 1. Back office The biggest category is document processing, with 5,588 builds. Its job is to be the first reader. An email, a PDF or a form arrives, and the agent reads it, sorts it and pulls out what matters. It’s also the stickiest category on the entire platform, at 11%. At the other end sits support operations: reading tickets and complaints as they come in. It sticks at 3%, the lowest in the back office. 2. Front office Marketing content dominates, with 5,481 builds. That’s more than the other three front office categories combined. But the one that sticks best is sales and lead generation, at 10%. That’s software finding the right people at target accounts and writing to them. 3. Other Software engineering is the largest category anywhere on CrewAI, with 5,952 builds. Yet only 5.7% stick. Financial markets are one of the stickiest, at 10%. You hand over a ticker or an earnings release, and you get a written read back. Education sits near the bottom, at 3.2%. What Jobs Are These Crew AI Agents Actually Doing? Forget the category labels for a second. Look at what each build actually does, and the same five jobs keep showing up. Think of them as five people in an office. 1. The mailroom. Something arrives, and the agent opens it first, sorts it and pulls out the details. Invoices, contracts, forms, inboxes. 7,883 builds · 8.7% stick 2. The analyst. You hand over a company, a market or a ticker, and you get a written brief back. Sales call prep, investment memos, competitor checks. 10,608 builds · 8.0% stick 3. The senior reviewer. Expert judgement on demand, like a first look at a loan file, a policy or a piece of code before a human signs off. 9,266 builds · 6.0% stick 4. The copywriter. A brief goes in, and a draft comes out. Product pages, articles, campaign copy, at volume. 6,929