AI Spending Is Up. So Is the Guesswork.

Good morning. As AI spending ricochets across the enterprise, many organization leaders still can’t say with confidence what they’re actually getting for it.

A Gartner survey of around 1,300 functional leaders from companies with at least $50 million in fiscal 2025 revenue found a sizable share—23%—have no idea of the rate of return on their AI investments. And even among those who do track it, the uses companies pursue most heavily often aren’t the ones generating the highest returns.

In IT, for example, cybersecurity-threat detection, service-desk automation and code generation are the most commonly pursued applications. But the uses most likely to show returns were IT asset and cost optimization, synthetic data generation and code generation, according to respondents.

Part of the disconnect comes down to how new most enterprises are to AI, said Tina Nunno, distinguished vice president & Gartner Fellow. In less AI-savvy companies, “we’re still not doing really good business cases for AI. They’re lacking the governance, they’re lacking the rigor,” she said.

The survey ran from January through April of this year.

Meanwhile AI investment gallops on, with 85% of functional leaders planning to increase spending in 2026 after allocating an average of 12% of their budgets to AI in 2025.

Boards are pushing the pace. In a related Gartner survey, Nunno said, some 80% of directors placed AI among the top five investments expected to drive shareholder value. The “vast majority of board members think their enterprises are spending too little on AI,” she said.

Yet returns so far remain scant. “Positive return is happening, but it’s still really modest,” Nunno said. Fifty-eight percent of functional leaders who do track performance reported a positive return, but the median return rate was 10%.

Enter the CIO

The combination of heavy investment and thin AI governance raises questions, but also a lesson in back to basics.

“Leaning in to some of the traditional skills around prioritization, governance, business cases, will yield a lot,” Nunno said. “And then by the same token, there are going to be a whole new set of skills that enterprises will need to govern AI.”

Chief information officers are positioned to close that gap, she argued.

“Great CIOs are phenomenal at scaling, and what everyone wants right now is scale out of AI,” she said. “Pockets of return are nice, but that’s not going to move the dial on earnings per share. The only thing that does that is if we implement at scale reliably.”

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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute’s new Executive Resilience series, where she’s profiling America’s top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

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