Dive Brief:
- Agentic AI is exceeding expectations around productivity and satisfaction at work, according to data from Accenture’s Pulse of Change report released last week, which surveyed 3,000 C-suite leaders and 3,000 non-C-suite employees. More than two-thirds of C-suite respondents said the effect of agentic AI has been greater than expected on employee productivity, and about the same number of employees said they’re overall more satisfied with their jobs overall.
- Though most companies are seeing some positive impact, fewer say they’re seeing sustained business value — impact that can be reported to a company’s board — from their AI investments. Just 23% of companies said they saw reportable business value in the July survey, down from 32% earlier this year.
- The dip follows a theme executives are seeing in 2026, where companies are trying to apply the technology to as many places as possible, rather than in targeted ways, Muqsit Ashraf, industry and enterprise global lead at Accetold CIO Dive. “Companies have rolled out the tools and copilots, and that produces local productivity, but it doesn’t produce enterprise-level PnL impact,” he said.
Dive Insight:
Nearly every enterprise is using AI in some capacity, but only the organizations that redesign their work around it can recover the millions spent on the technology.
Much of AI spending is squandered — about one in every four dollars spent on AI goes to waste as enterprises accelerate efforts to bring spending under control, a recent Harness report found. Still, 82% of C-suite leaders said they plan on increasing their investments, according to Accenture.
For enterprises to get the most out of their AI investments, they should think about going deep with their AI deployments, not wide, Ashraf said. Instead of applying AI across every process in an organization, find the few instances where automating workflows with an agentic system could make the most impact.
“Take a handful of agentic use cases all the way to a more reportable outcome, rather than running hundreds of these shallow pilots,” Ashraf said.
Enterprise roles are changing because of the technology, Accenture found. While 78% of leaders said they expect their employees’ jobs to change in the next year, 57% of employees said they already have. Nearly three-quarters of leaders said their organization will be creating new entry-level positions that have an AI focus in the next few years.
To ensure employees have a strong AI culture at work, leaders should start by modeling the behavior, Ashraf said. In many workplaces, the C-suite lags in its AI use — only about one-quarter of top executives use the technology on a daily basis, Ashraf said.
Lastly, organizations need to rewire the whole business, not just their technology use. This includes redefining roles, fixing the data foundation, refinding governance and putting in place a way to audit the outcomes for that reportable business value.
“To date, a lot of AI has been assistive, it helps people do existing work faster. It’s been bolted on existing processes, and that’s useful,” Ashraf said. “But you don’t transform a business by doing the old things a little quicker, a little better.”
