Before you buy more AI, diagnose the gap you actually have
A senior executive at a large enterprise recently described a capital allocation review to me. The committee had spent two hours deciding where the next tranche of maintenance capital should go.
A senior executive at a large enterprise recently described a capital allocation review to me. The committee had spent two hours deciding where the next tranche of maintenance capital should go.
Somewhere in that same organization sat a predictive model estimating failure risk across the asset base. It was reasonably good. A competent team had built it sometime earlier. Nobody in the room referred to it or mentioned it.
What bothered him was not that the model was wrong. It was not wrong. It wasn’t late, and it wasn’t hard to access. It simply had no relationship with the decision.
I have heard enough versions of that story to believe it describes the central problem in enterprise AI right now — and that we are consistently solving for the wrong thing.
Mckinsey’s The State of AI in 2026 makes the point clearly. Almost nine in ten organizations report regular AI use in at least one business function, and around 44% say AI is scaling across the enterprise. Eight in ten report higher individual productivity. Yet only about 37% attribute any positive enterprise-level EBIT impact to AI.
BCG’s survey of large-company CEOs found nearly nine in ten reporting cost or revenue benefits in targeted areas — while more than half cited a missing link between AI and P&L, and only 14% had clearly defined P&L impact across their AI initiatives. PwC’s 2026 CEO survey put it even more starkly: 12% of CEOs said AI had delivered both revenue gains and cost reductions.
In context
- Topic: Estrategia y Gobierno de TI — Decisiones de portafolio, costo total, gobierno y marcos de referencia.
- Source: CIO
- Published: 06/10/2026
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Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.
Why it matters
When an organisation announces a turn like this, the announcement is rarely the interesting part. What matters is everything it forces to be reordered underneath: committed budgets, live contracts, teams built for something else. That is where you find out whether the decision had real backing or was a slide in a deck.
My filter is always the same: does this change a decision, or only a tool? If at the end of the quarter the same people are approving the same things by the same criteria, there was no transformation, there was a purchase. The difference shows up in the committee minutes, not in the press release.
What usually goes wrong
Where I see this fail most is in the second half of the year. The announcement is made with energy, the team gets assembled, and eight months later the person driving it changed role or company. Without an institutional owner, not just a personal one, the programme fades without anybody formally cancelling it.
What to watch
- What gets switched off to fund the new thing; if nothing does, the budget will hurt in six months.
- How the relationship with current vendors is left, which is usually where the dependency nobody measured is sitting.
- Who ends up owning the decision, and with what budget of their own rather than borrowed.
How I read this entry
If this landed on my desk, the first thing I would ask for is not a plan. It is an honest inventory of what is already running and what it costs to keep it alive. It almost always turns out that the budget for the new thing comes from switching off something old that nobody wants to name, and that conversation decides whether the project lives.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
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Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
