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".

Calls held Said "agentic" Said "generative AI" Mentioned AI at all

Jan to Mar 2024 0.2% 16.8% 43.1%

Jan to Mar 2025 6.3% 16.0% 52.2%

Oct to Dec 2025 14.5% 12.8% 65.5%

Jul to Sep 2026 20.3% 5.6% 69.5%

Oct 1 to 23, 2026 28.2% 3.8% 71.8%

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.…