Companies continue to invest heavily in artificial intelligence, even though the vast majority fail to actually embed the technology widely across their organisation.
This emerges from a Gartner survey of 1,303 respondents. Only 22% of organisations have successfully scaled AI across multiple business units or apply an AI‑first approach.
Despite the modest results, there is little sign of cold feet. Eighty‑five per cent of respondents plan to further increase AI spending in 2026.
According to Gartner analyst Tina Nunno, this combination of disappointing scalability and irrepressible investment appetite is a problem. She argued that the lack of financial insight undermines the control organisations should have over their own AI spending.
The survey draws a sharp distinction between what Gartner calls ‘high performers’ and ‘low performers’. The frontrunners keep a close eye on the returns from their AI initiatives. This leads to visible results. In this group, 81% of AI initiatives delivered a positive return. Among the laggards, however, there was no visibility of the outcomes. For 29% of their AI projects, they were unable to indicate whether there was a result and, if so, what it was.
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