A new survey of 1,719 executives finds AI use is widespread, but only 6% of companies count as true AI high performers seeing real profit gains.
Almost every company now uses AI somewhere in the business. Getting real money out of it is a different story.
A new global survey of 1,719 executives and employees across 97 countries, fielded between May and June 2026, finds that 89% of organizations now use AI regularly in at least one business function. Eighty percent of individual employees say AI has made them more productive.
Yet only 37% of organizations report that AI has meaningfully boosted their bottom line, a figure barely moved from a year ago. Just 6% of companies qualify as genuine “AI high performers,” meaning AI drives at least 5% of their profit and delivers what they describe as significant value.
More Companies Are Scaling AI, Not Just Testing It
The share of organizations running AI across the enterprise, rather than in scattered pilots, climbed to 44% in 2026, up from 38% the year before. Companies are also spreading AI further inside their operations: 56% now use it in three or more business functions, up from 51%.
Company size matters a lot here. Among organizations with at least $1 billion in annual revenue, 54% are now scaling AI across the enterprise. Among smaller companies, only 33% are. Big companies also pulled further ahead on agentic AI specifically: the share of large organizations scaling AI agents jumped from 27% to 40% in a single year, while smaller organizations stayed flat at 22%.
Coding Agents Are Changing What Companies Buy
One of the more concrete shifts this year involves software coding agents, AI tools that can write and ship code with minimal human help. About two in ten companies are already scaling these tools, rising to 31% among larger enterprises.
That capability is changing purchasing decisions. Nearly a third of respondents (32%) say their organization decided against buying a software product or feature because they could build it in-house using agentic coding tools instead. The pattern is strongest in technology (41%) and healthcare (39%), followed by professional services and energy companies.
Senior partner Lieven Van der Veken, one of the report’s co-authors, frames this as a shift in posture rather than a rejection of vendors: “The organizations moving fastest are becoming more deliberate about where to buy, where to build, and where to develop enough internal capability to integrate and scale what works.”
Employees Feel the Difference. Balance Sheets Don’t, Yet
The gap between what individuals experience and what shows up in company financials is the survey’s central finding.
Eighty percent of respondents say AI has improved their personal productivity. Half say it helps them make better decisions, and 53% say it’s helped them develop new skills. Those numbers hold up consistently whether the respondent is a C-level executive or an individual contributor.
But that personal boost hasn’t scaled into company profit. Only 37% of respondents attribute any EBIT impact to AI use at all, essentially unchanged from the 2025 survey. Cost savings do show up at the function level, most often in supply chain management, service operations, and manufacturing.
Revenue gains, where they exist, cluster in marketing and sales and product development. But those scattered wins aren’t yet adding up to company-wide financial transformation for most organizations.
There’s also a fairness gap in how AI feels day to day. Midlevel managers and individual contributors are notably more likely than executives to report downsides such as stress, mental fatigue, or feeling overwhelmed by AI output. Forty-seven percent of managers and individual contributors report at least one negative effect, compared with 31% of executives and senior managers.
The Cost of AI Is Starting to Bite
About one in five organizations (20%) say AI-related operating costs, including the cost of the tokens that power AI models, are now limiting how much they use these tools. That constraint shows up fairly evenly across chatbots, AI agents, and coding agents.
Despite that, spending is still climbing. Twenty-eight percent of companies now put more than 10% of their total technology budget toward AI, and 60% expect to increase AI investment over the next year. Pharmaceutical, insurance, and financial services companies are the most likely to plan bigger increases.
Senior fellow Michael Chui, another co-author, says the economics are catching leadership by surprise: “They’ve discovered that AI isn’t ‘too cheap to meter’ when it comes to agentic software development and complex reasoning tasks that benefit most from frontier models. Even as per-token costs have declined, the number of tokens consumed and generated has increased even faster.”
What the Top 6% Do Differently
The small group of AI high performers, just 6% of respondents, offers the clearest playbook for the rest. They aren’t simply spending more, although they are more than twice as likely as other companies to put over 15% of their tech budget toward AI.
What sets them apart is how they use the technology. While 82% of typical companies focus AI purely on efficiency and cost-cutting, high performers spread their ambitions further: 78% pursue efficiency, but 74% also pursue growth and 65% pursue innovation, like building new products or business models.
High performers are 3.3 times more likely to say they intend to use AI to fundamentally transform their business within three years, and nearly three-quarters have already redesigned their workflows around AI, up sharply from 55% a year ago.
High performers also scale a much broader set of AI tools. They’re more than three times as likely as other companies to have scaled AI agents across most business functions, and they manage the associated risks more actively too, particularly cybersecurity threats and the risk of AI systems taking unauthorized or unintended actions.
Associate partner Tara Balakrishnan, a contributor to the report, sums up the distinction: “High performers use AI to pursue growth and/or innovation alongside efficiency; they fundamentally redesign workflows rather than layer AI onto existing ones; and they embrace practices that sustain deployment, such as senior-leadership role modeling, human-in-the-loop design, impact measurement, and risk management.”
Predicted Layoffs Ran Ahead of Reality
Fears about AI-driven job losses climbed again this year, but the actual numbers tell a more measured story than last year’s forecasts suggested.
Back in 2025, 32% of respondents expected AI to shrink their organization’s total headcount over the following year. When 2026 arrived, only 14% reported that AI had actually contributed to a workforce decline, less than half of what had been predicted. Two-thirds of respondents said their organization’s headcount saw little or no AI-related change at all.
That hasn’t stopped expectations from rising again. Looking ahead to the next year, 39% of respondents now expect AI to shrink their workforce, up from 32% a year ago, while 43% expect little or no change. Despite that, most employees don’t seem to feel personally threatened: only 13% say AI makes them anxious about their own career prospects.
The Bottom Line
The survey’s authors describe a widening gap between how confident companies feel about AI and how much of that confidence has actually translated into profit. Organizations keep scaling AI, buying fewer software products in favor of building their own, and planning to spend more, even though the share reporting real financial impact hasn’t moved much in a year.
The lesson from the top 6%, according to the research, isn’t a bigger AI budget. It’s using AI to redesign how work actually gets done, rather than bolting it onto processes that were built for a world without it.