As 2026 rolls in, ROI is stepping into the AI driver’s seat.
After three years of experimenting and spending, and as talk of an AI bubble looms, enterprises are starting to demand results. According to Kyndryl’s recent Readiness Report, drawing on insights from 3,700 business executives, 61% of CEOs say they are under increasing pressure to show returns on their AI investments compared with a year ago.
This is putting company leaders to the test in terms of balancing long-term innovation with the need to prove outcomes now, all while AI development continues to move at breakneck speed. It’s also creating risks of misalignment in the C-suite, with tech and business leaders looking out for their firm’s innovation while financial leaders look out for the balance sheet.
“The last year was a lot about experimental budgets, like, ‘I’m just going to give the budget to every department [and] experiment with whatever tools they think are useful,’” said Lexi Reese, a former strategy executive at firms including Google and the current CEO of AI observability platform Lanai. “Now, it’s accountable acceleration, because the price tag on this is very expensive.”
The AI spending spree
The unprecedented amount of money being spent to develop and deploy AI has been grabbing headlines all year. Much of this surrounds infrastructure spending by frontier AI labs and eye-popping startup investments, but enterprises are heavily investing, too. Gartner expects spending on AI application software to more than triple from last year to almost $270 billion in 2026. Over the past year, Reese said she’s had conversations with over 300 customers about their AI tool costs and found they are spending between $590 and $1,400 per employee annually, according to internal data shared with Fortune.
For many executives, this is causing flashbacks to digital transformations of the past—in particular, the transition to cloud, which left some with a bad taste in their mouth. Michael Bradshaw, global practice leader for applications, data, and AI at Kyndryl, told Fortune he sees this consistently in his role, where he works with executives on bridging the gap between their business strategy and what they are actually trying to do with their technology.
