Teneo survey of 350+ public-company CEOs: 68% plan to spend more on AI in 2026 than in 2025, <50% of AI projects generated more returns than they cost, and more
Ben Glickman / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
This survey extends a persistent split in enterprise AI adoption: a 2024 CIO poll found broad intent to raise investment even as many expected delayed returns, while an IBM CEO survey found only a minority of initiatives had met expected ROI. The Teneo results show that gap remains unresolved among public-company leaders.
The earlier limited rate of AI initiatives meeting expected ROI makes the planned spending increase notable: executives appear to be funding continued experimentation and scaling despite uneven project economics.
First-order effects
- Surveyed public-company CEOs are likely to allocate more of their 2026 technology budgets to AI, even though fewer than half of projects have produced returns above cost.
- The result raises the immediate bar on AI leaders to distinguish projects with measurable economic returns from pilots whose costs remain hard to justify.
Second-order effects
- AI vendors and infrastructure providers retain a supportive enterprise-demand signal, but customers may concentrate incremental budgets on deployments with clearer cost and return measurement.
- The gap between spending plans and realized returns should increase pressure on procurement and finance teams to track AI costs and outcomes at the project level.
Third-order effects
- If investment continues ahead of demonstrated returns, enterprise AI may evolve from broad experimentation toward a more disciplined market organized around cost per useful task and repeatable deployment economics.
- The durability of AI spending will increasingly depend on whether companies can convert adoption intent into auditable returns, rather than on deployment growth alone.
The trend: Enterprise AI is moving from an investment-led adoption cycle toward a proving phase in which continued budget growth must coexist with stronger ROI accountability.