Dive Brief:
- Enterprise confidence in AI is quickly growing as more companies move their pilots into production phases and see ROI, according to KPMG’s quarterly AI survey, released Tuesday. KPMG polled more than 2,100 senior tech decision-makers in 20 countries in April and May for the results.
- In the second quarter, 71% of organizations said they are making good progress toward a fully integrated AI-human workforce, up from 60% earlier this year. Nearly a quarter of organizations say they are embedding AI into their daily workflows, up from 13% in Q1.
- Organizations that have leadership accountability structures for their AI systems are seeing better results than those that don’t address AI culture with the C-suite, Steve Chase, KPMG’s global head of AI and digital innovation, said in the report. “These companies are seeing materially better results across the board such as greater confidence, higher value realization and established ROI,” he said.
Dive Insight:
The pressure to find ROI in enterprisewide AI adoption is increasing, as U.S. tech leaders expect to spend nearly double on AI compared with last year, and say they feel it could impact their job security if they don’t produce results.
KPMG’s Q1 survey found gaps between companies that were in their experimentation phase and those that had fully scaled their AI agents. By Q2, companies reported they were 12 percentage points more confident that AI was delivering value for their organizations, and 8 percentage points more confident in their organization’s ability to future-proof their AI strategy.
KPMG’s data shows that sponsoring AI implementation isn’t the same as having accountability for AI outcomes. Those with clearly defined accountability for AI outcomes established ROI at three times the rate as those without it, the survey found.
More organizations reported moving into mature phases of their AI deployment strategies this quarter, with 29% saying they are “in the later stages” compared with 21% earlier this year. Employee adoption of AI agents was up three percentage points from Q1, to 28%.
The questions around AI adoption are changing for maturing companies, the survey found. Leaders are focusing on how to scale, spending less time debating the technology itself and spending more time figuring out its role in the business.
“With this maturity, we are seeing a shift this quarter towards pragmatism as leaders move past theoretical questions and into practical ones: where is AI creating value, who owns the outcomes and how is it changing work,” Chase said.
The perception of value isn’t entirely aligned across the C-suite, with CIOs and other tech decision-makers reporting higher levels of confidence than CEOs and board members, according to a Protiviti study.
As enterprises become more fluent in their AI uses, priorities are shifting, KPMG found. Human-AI collaboration, responsible AI and governance, adaptability and resilience, and ecosystem partnerships gained priority from earlier this year.
But AI’s value depends on understanding what it costs to build, run and scale it, Chase said in the report. And many organizations are still building their capacity to measure those metrics.
“It’s not about rigid cost control but cost visibility,” Chase said. “It’s about knowing where money is going, how AI is being used and what outcomes that spend is producing.”
