Automation's Early Footprint: The ATE Dataset
Cohere, Thursday, September 3rd, 2026
Cohere studied 696,000 AI tools and found only 2.6% truly automate work, releasing the Agentic Task Ecosystem dataset.
Cohere Labs published research examining 696,000 AI tools to measure how much genuine work automation is actually happening. The finding is that only 2.6% truly automate a task rather than assisting a human within it.
The team released the underlying Agentic Task Ecosystem (ATE) dataset so others can interrogate the same evidence. The post uses the data to argue about how automation is reshaping jobs, against a debate that has been unusually short on measurement.