17 ms·

56% of CEOs report zero financial return from AI in 2026 (PwC survey, n=4,454)

72 points by harran 7mo ago

ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
Related: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055979
harran 7mo ago
I've been building implementation guides for solo founders and small businesses trying to use AI practically, so I read the PwC CEO Survey closely when it dropped. The headline number (12% of CEOs generating measurable returns) gets cited a lot, but I think the more revealing finding is the 56% with zero financial impact. These are companies with enterprise AI budgets, dedicated teams, and access to every tool on the market and the majority are getting nothing back. PwC calls it "Pilot Purgatory." The pattern: AI gets deployed in isolated, tactical projects that don't connect to revenue. internal tooling, content drafts, meeting summaries while the 12% they call the "Vanguard" are using AI in the product and customer experience itself (44% of Vanguard vs 17% of everyone else). What I found interesting from a solo founder angle: the structural barriers causing large companies to fail at this “bureaucracy, legacy systems, misaligned incentives, multi-department approval processes” don't exist at the one-person scale. The bottleneck for small operators is different: it's not knowing which workflows are worth building, in what order, and what "system-level" vs "task-level" use actually means in practice. Curious if others have a take on why the enterprise failure rate is this high despite the investment, and whether the Vanguard pattern (AI into the product, not just the back office) matches what people are seeing in practice.
- andsoitis 7mo ago
  > The bottleneck for small operators is different: it's not knowing which workflows are worth building, in what order, and what "system-level" vs "task-level" use actually means in practice. Are you saying that from what you see, small operators also fail to get ROI, but for different reasons?
  - harran 7mo ago
    yes, but not at the same rate. and yes it's usually for different reasons. Enterprises usually struggle because of structure: approvals, incentives, legacy systems, fragmentation. Small operators usually struggle because they stay at the task level "prompt-by-prompt productivity boosts" instead of building workflow-level or system-level leverage.
- al_borland 7mo ago
  I work in a large enterprise. On one hand, we’re being told we should think of ways to use AI more. On the other hand, to even start (beyond just using Copilot to develop what I’m already working on), I need to have an idea and sell it to some AI board to get their blessing. At that point, I will have a microscope on me, tracking everything, to watch if this wild experiment is a success or failure. No thanks. If they really want me to try something new, they will give me the space to try things where I am free to fail quietly and privately, pivot, and continue trying things. Asking for ship dates on day one is no way to operate projects with so many unknown unknowns. No one wants to learn and fail with an audience.
  - watwut 7mo ago
    That is kind of weird take, because whole my life, people WANTED to be part of initiatives like this and were jealous of people selected for initiatives like that.
    - al_borland 7mo ago
      I found things go much better for me when I can work on a project on my own, then if it works well, show it off and let it go up the chain. I can then focus on the work, pivot as needed, or scrap the idea if it didn’t pan out. A co-worker of mine had an idea recently (not AI related). He told our manager and sr director about it. I think now it’s gone up to the VP level. The whole project hinges on a very specific thing working that some other team needs to do with a vendor tool and is having a lot of trouble actually getting right. Meanwhile, he’s now been asked to make multiple presentations to justify and defend it, and there are 2 or 3 separate project managers trying to track it, each with their own set of weekly meetings, tracking spreadsheet, and other such things. All those PMs are also asking for timelines and dates for a lot of unknown unknowns. All our time is being engulfed by ceremony and bureaucracy, and we don’t even know if it will work yet. If that one piece doesn’t pan out, it will be a very public failure and we’ll then be expected to come up with some other option. My part of it also involves a vendor tool. When I POC’d my part, it worked fine. When I went to set it up with some real data later, the tool isn’t working, despite the POC still running and updating fine. I can’t even replicate the POC again, but it might randomly work next week. There are bugs in systems I don’t control. It’s not a total deal breaker, but it’s a risk and may require a pivot that would fundamentally change how parts of it work that have already been presented. Had he waited a bit to see if it will actually work, it would be no big deal and wouldn’t have cost us much time. Instead, if the vendor tool falls through, or we need to pivot to work around a bug, we now need to show that to all these people, explain why it didn’t work, and get beat up about it. We also need to pretend to be busy with this and make progress on it, when we’re in a holding pattern waiting for our dependency that may or may not work. We also found out this week that if someone on that other team makes a small mistake, it wipes out everything and the house of cards crumbles. I personally think it’s a big enough risk to scrap the whole idea and find something else, but it’s too late for that now. Of course, I tend to like to work in the background. I want the organization to function better and more smoothly. I’m not just seeking glory. I’ve still ended up being the one our team tapped when the CIO came knocking for some big project he wanted to see done quickly, despite trying to stay out of it. I don’t think anyone was jealous of me, they were all happy that they didn’t have to deal with all the uncertainty. The only good thing about that was because it was the CIO asking, it was very easy to ignore everything else and I was able to knock it out pretty fast. Maybe you’ve worked in companies with less bureaucracy or cultures that can handle these types of projects better. For us, it feels like no good deed goes unpunished, so it’s just easier to keep your mouth shut and focus on the work until there is something actually worth showing. That is especially true for these grass roots projects vs big corporate sponsored projects that are happening no matter what.
- treetalker 7mo ago
  The following is my take on what's happening — outside the software-development domain, which is special vis-à-vis LLMs for obvious reasons. Given worker access to generative LLMs, plus training and motivation to use them, LLMs are effective for certain workflows. Those workflows tend to be personal, one-offs, or summarization in nature: write a bash script for this headache I have every day; tell me what colleague X is trying to say in his 1200-word email, since his writing is garbage and he can't get to the point; "what's the Excel formula syntax for this other thing that I keep forgetting?"; etc. So the time and mental-energy savings inures to the workers, mostly from coordination tasks that don't directly create core value. And then those savings aren't "reinvested" into value-producing activities whose benefits would inure to the firm because the workers have no incentive to do so; don't know how to create core value; don't have the skills to create core value; or aren't permitted to do those activities by higher-ups. Bottom line: LLMs are eating busywork coordination activities — hence no impact on most firms' bottom lines.
  - harran 7mo ago
    Exactly! this aligns with the "pilot purgatory" pattern. AI boosts productivity at the task level, but unless those savings are applied to workflows that directly drive revenue or strategic value, the firm sees little financial impact. It's a classic misalignment between individual efficiency and organizational ROI.
    - nlawalker 7mo ago
      > PwC calls it "Pilot Purgatory." The pattern: AI gets deployed in isolated, tactical projects that don't connect to revenue. I feel like both the name and the description miss the mark though - the use isn't in pilots or isolated projects, it's individual people using it to find stuff and read/write/code/work/make decisions for them, and none of that is going to drive strategic value until companies raise expectations on productivity to take advantage of it. It makes me think of a couple of bullet points from that "An AI CEO said something honest" post[1]: > - majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life > - they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042788
orionblastar 7mo ago
The average person is not ready for AI yet. Microsoft's Copilot has a low adoption rate. Data Centers have big energy bills and a lack of clients, and have no ROI for most of them.
- harran 7mo ago
  I think you’re pointing at something real. Adoption lag matters. If the end user doesn't change behavior, ROI won’t show up no matter how much infrastructure gets built. I’d add another layer though: expectations. Many CEOs implicitly treat AI like deterministic software. install it, flip the switch, get linear productivity gains. But these systems are probabilistic. They’re "slippery" Output quality varies, edge cases multiply, and oversight is required. That makes ROI non-linear.
- estimator7292 7mo ago
  Is the product bad or is literally everyone else wrong? Who can guess!
  - orionblastar 7mo ago
    The current generation of children uses AI on their smartphones. The average adult doesn't use or doesn't know how to use AI. In time, the children will grow up to get AI jobs, and the average adult will be a senior citizen.
    - autoexec 7mo ago
      If AI were actually capable of delivering on the promises driving the bubble, the next generation of children won't grow up to get jobs at all unless they're serving or cleaning up after trillionaires, or selling their bodies. Thankfully, there's basically zero chance of AI delivering on those promises. It'll continue to be useful sometimes, in some ways, to some people, but I'm less than optimistic that most people will be feel like what they've gained was worth what they lost and that includes most CEOs.
      - 7mo ago
atela 7mo ago
The question is whether legacy players can drive strategic growth that changes their trajectory to meet the AI-native disrupters. This is a data point.
- harran 7mo ago
  Exactly! having the budget isn't enough. Legacy players need to adapt processes and incentives to turn AI investment into real strategic advantage, or AI-native disruptors will outpace them.
  - add-sub-mul-div 7mo ago
    Are these AI-native disruptors in the room with us now?
    - harran 7mo ago
      AI-native disruptors are designing products and experiences around AI from inception, rapidly capturing value and reshaping customer expectations. In the near term, for some, that is a raising red flag.
      - jdlshore 7mo ago
        Who? The only “disrupters” I see are AI hypesters selling AI tools. Who are the people using these tools to create successful businesses and (non-AI) products?
        drakinosh 7mo ago
        Is this some umpteenth-level irony or are you simply missing the joke?
    - tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
      Their bots are.
- 7mo ago
atlgator 7mo ago
Buying a gym membership has never made anyone fit.
- harran 7mo ago
  True, but it's also more than just using the tool, it's also how it's applied.
hulitu 7mo ago
> 56% of CEOs report zero financial return from AI in 2026 (PwC survey, n=4,454) This is a lie. It can't be zero. It is negative.
- apercu 7mo ago
  It’s quite possible you are correct, but since gen-ai is good at generating stuff, it is taking on busy work, which might bring the ROI back to ~zero. In my business I suspect that gen ai has provided a modest productivity boost (single digit) but, due to other factors, I can’t quantify the revenue impact.
5o1ecist 7mo ago
[flagged]
fpaf 7mo ago
I'm not saying that CEOs (or devs, for that matter) lie. But on AI I don't think we can rely on any self-reported results, positive or negative, based on surveys. There is just too much incentive to say... no, to BELIEVE... both that AI yields 10x productivity that AI is useless. I am swinging wildly between the two too, personally. The more time I spend with AI, the more I am developing this split personality where one part of me says "I hope this thing blows up before I lose my job and my children never have the chance to have an office job again" and the other one says "AI is actually not easy! You have to know how to use it well, deveop tools, plan, curate your context... This means I am acquiring useful skills here, tring to port Flappy Bird to COBOL". And obviously, depending which side controls my cortex in that moment, I may err on the "AI is useless crap" or the "AI all the things!" side
- evolve2k 7mo ago
  I think an interesting analogy for what many of us are experiencing here is the phenomena of Doom Scrolling; deep down we know we should put it down (and go outside), but the immediate experience of it and the value it feels like it’s offering in the moment has you keep scrolling and scrolling. Similarly many have reported a sense of say programming productivity but a more objective reflection later on reveals the myriad issues with constantly and subtly heralding in large quantities of lower quality code and blowing past any caution or rigourkus discipline that would come with the laying down of lines of code “by hand”.
  - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    I don't know. I'm having coworkers resign due to AI mandates from upper management. Some of them are saying they are going to move on from the tech industry It's not just doom scrolling. AI is having a substantial negative impact on some people
    - eudamoniac 7mo ago
      I have also decided to do this as soon as the burden of lying about my AI usage becomes too onerous. Right now at Cisco, there are no mandates, only very strong recommendations with the explicit threat of being "left behind" if you fail to comply. Some teams have included AI usage in their personal KPIs which affect bonuses and promotions, but mine fortunately has not. Once the execs or my personal manager implement AI requirements, I'll have to start lying, which I really prefer not to do. If they start tracking, then I'll have to vibecode a script to make bullshit requests to the API each day. And if they start auditing, then I'll just check out (more than usual) and wait to be fired. They're only hurting themselves with this shit.
irenetusuq 7mo ago
[dead]
adrian-vega 7mo ago
[dead]

72 points by harran 7mo ago

Related: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055979

harran 7mo ago

I've been building implementation guides for solo founders and small businesses trying to use AI practically, so I read the PwC CEO Survey closely when it dropped. The headline number (12% of CEOs generating measurable returns) gets cited a lot, but I think the more revealing finding is the 56% with zero financial impact. These are companies with enterprise AI budgets, dedicated teams, and access to every tool on the market and the majority are getting nothing back. PwC calls it "Pilot Purgatory." The pattern: AI gets deployed in isolated, tactical projects that don't connect to revenue. internal tooling, content drafts, meeting summaries while the 12% they call the "Vanguard" are using AI in the product and customer experience itself (44% of Vanguard vs 17% of everyone else). What I found interesting from a solo founder angle: the structural barriers causing large companies to fail at this “bureaucracy, legacy systems, misaligned incentives, multi-department approval processes” don't exist at the one-person scale. The bottleneck for small operators is different: it's not knowing which workflows are worth building, in what order, and what "system-level" vs "task-level" use actually means in practice. Curious if others have a take on why the enterprise failure rate is this high despite the investment, and whether the Vanguard pattern (AI into the product, not just the back office) matches what people are seeing in practice.

andsoitis 7mo ago
> The bottleneck for small operators is different: it's not knowing which workflows are worth building, in what order, and what "system-level" vs "task-level" use actually means in practice. Are you saying that from what you see, small operators also fail to get ROI, but for different reasons?
- harran 7mo ago
  yes, but not at the same rate. and yes it's usually for different reasons. Enterprises usually struggle because of structure: approvals, incentives, legacy systems, fragmentation. Small operators usually struggle because they stay at the task level "prompt-by-prompt productivity boosts" instead of building workflow-level or system-level leverage.
al_borland 7mo ago
I work in a large enterprise. On one hand, we’re being told we should think of ways to use AI more. On the other hand, to even start (beyond just using Copilot to develop what I’m already working on), I need to have an idea and sell it to some AI board to get their blessing. At that point, I will have a microscope on me, tracking everything, to watch if this wild experiment is a success or failure. No thanks. If they really want me to try something new, they will give me the space to try things where I am free to fail quietly and privately, pivot, and continue trying things. Asking for ship dates on day one is no way to operate projects with so many unknown unknowns. No one wants to learn and fail with an audience.
- watwut 7mo ago
  That is kind of weird take, because whole my life, people WANTED to be part of initiatives like this and were jealous of people selected for initiatives like that.
  - al_borland 7mo ago
    I found things go much better for me when I can work on a project on my own, then if it works well, show it off and let it go up the chain. I can then focus on the work, pivot as needed, or scrap the idea if it didn’t pan out. A co-worker of mine had an idea recently (not AI related). He told our manager and sr director about it. I think now it’s gone up to the VP level. The whole project hinges on a very specific thing working that some other team needs to do with a vendor tool and is having a lot of trouble actually getting right. Meanwhile, he’s now been asked to make multiple presentations to justify and defend it, and there are 2 or 3 separate project managers trying to track it, each with their own set of weekly meetings, tracking spreadsheet, and other such things. All those PMs are also asking for timelines and dates for a lot of unknown unknowns. All our time is being engulfed by ceremony and bureaucracy, and we don’t even know if it will work yet. If that one piece doesn’t pan out, it will be a very public failure and we’ll then be expected to come up with some other option. My part of it also involves a vendor tool. When I POC’d my part, it worked fine. When I went to set it up with some real data later, the tool isn’t working, despite the POC still running and updating fine. I can’t even replicate the POC again, but it might randomly work next week. There are bugs in systems I don’t control. It’s not a total deal breaker, but it’s a risk and may require a pivot that would fundamentally change how parts of it work that have already been presented. Had he waited a bit to see if it will actually work, it would be no big deal and wouldn’t have cost us much time. Instead, if the vendor tool falls through, or we need to pivot to work around a bug, we now need to show that to all these people, explain why it didn’t work, and get beat up about it. We also need to pretend to be busy with this and make progress on it, when we’re in a holding pattern waiting for our dependency that may or may not work. We also found out this week that if someone on that other team makes a small mistake, it wipes out everything and the house of cards crumbles. I personally think it’s a big enough risk to scrap the whole idea and find something else, but it’s too late for that now. Of course, I tend to like to work in the background. I want the organization to function better and more smoothly. I’m not just seeking glory. I’ve still ended up being the one our team tapped when the CIO came knocking for some big project he wanted to see done quickly, despite trying to stay out of it. I don’t think anyone was jealous of me, they were all happy that they didn’t have to deal with all the uncertainty. The only good thing about that was because it was the CIO asking, it was very easy to ignore everything else and I was able to knock it out pretty fast. Maybe you’ve worked in companies with less bureaucracy or cultures that can handle these types of projects better. For us, it feels like no good deed goes unpunished, so it’s just easier to keep your mouth shut and focus on the work until there is something actually worth showing. That is especially true for these grass roots projects vs big corporate sponsored projects that are happening no matter what.
treetalker 7mo ago
The following is my take on what's happening — outside the software-development domain, which is special vis-à-vis LLMs for obvious reasons. Given worker access to generative LLMs, plus training and motivation to use them, LLMs are effective for certain workflows. Those workflows tend to be personal, one-offs, or summarization in nature: write a bash script for this headache I have every day; tell me what colleague X is trying to say in his 1200-word email, since his writing is garbage and he can't get to the point; "what's the Excel formula syntax for this other thing that I keep forgetting?"; etc. So the time and mental-energy savings inures to the workers, mostly from coordination tasks that don't directly create core value. And then those savings aren't "reinvested" into value-producing activities whose benefits would inure to the firm because the workers have no incentive to do so; don't know how to create core value; don't have the skills to create core value; or aren't permitted to do those activities by higher-ups. Bottom line: LLMs are eating busywork coordination activities — hence no impact on most firms' bottom lines.
- harran 7mo ago
  Exactly! this aligns with the "pilot purgatory" pattern. AI boosts productivity at the task level, but unless those savings are applied to workflows that directly drive revenue or strategic value, the firm sees little financial impact. It's a classic misalignment between individual efficiency and organizational ROI.
  - nlawalker 7mo ago
    > PwC calls it "Pilot Purgatory." The pattern: AI gets deployed in isolated, tactical projects that don't connect to revenue. I feel like both the name and the description miss the mark though - the use isn't in pilots or isolated projects, it's individual people using it to find stuff and read/write/code/work/make decisions for them, and none of that is going to drive strategic value until companies raise expectations on productivity to take advantage of it. It makes me think of a couple of bullet points from that "An AI CEO said something honest" post[1]: > - majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life > - they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042788

orionblastar 7mo ago

The average person is not ready for AI yet. Microsoft's Copilot has a low adoption rate. Data Centers have big energy bills and a lack of clients, and have no ROI for most of them.

harran 7mo ago
I think you’re pointing at something real. Adoption lag matters. If the end user doesn't change behavior, ROI won’t show up no matter how much infrastructure gets built. I’d add another layer though: expectations. Many CEOs implicitly treat AI like deterministic software. install it, flip the switch, get linear productivity gains. But these systems are probabilistic. They’re "slippery" Output quality varies, edge cases multiply, and oversight is required. That makes ROI non-linear.
estimator7292 7mo ago
Is the product bad or is literally everyone else wrong? Who can guess!
- orionblastar 7mo ago
  The current generation of children uses AI on their smartphones. The average adult doesn't use or doesn't know how to use AI. In time, the children will grow up to get AI jobs, and the average adult will be a senior citizen.
  - autoexec 7mo ago
    If AI were actually capable of delivering on the promises driving the bubble, the next generation of children won't grow up to get jobs at all unless they're serving or cleaning up after trillionaires, or selling their bodies. Thankfully, there's basically zero chance of AI delivering on those promises. It'll continue to be useful sometimes, in some ways, to some people, but I'm less than optimistic that most people will be feel like what they've gained was worth what they lost and that includes most CEOs.
    - 7mo ago

atela 7mo ago

The question is whether legacy players can drive strategic growth that changes their trajectory to meet the AI-native disrupters. This is a data point.

harran 7mo ago
Exactly! having the budget isn't enough. Legacy players need to adapt processes and incentives to turn AI investment into real strategic advantage, or AI-native disruptors will outpace them.
- add-sub-mul-div 7mo ago
  Are these AI-native disruptors in the room with us now?
  - harran 7mo ago
    AI-native disruptors are designing products and experiences around AI from inception, rapidly capturing value and reshaping customer expectations. In the near term, for some, that is a raising red flag.
    - jdlshore 7mo ago
      Who? The only “disrupters” I see are AI hypesters selling AI tools. Who are the people using these tools to create successful businesses and (non-AI) products?
      - drakinosh 7mo ago
        Is this some umpteenth-level irony or are you simply missing the joke?
  - tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
    Their bots are.
7mo ago

atlgator 7mo ago

Buying a gym membership has never made anyone fit.

harran 7mo ago
True, but it's also more than just using the tool, it's also how it's applied.

hulitu 7mo ago

> 56% of CEOs report zero financial return from AI in 2026 (PwC survey, n=4,454) This is a lie. It can't be zero. It is negative.

apercu 7mo ago
It’s quite possible you are correct, but since gen-ai is good at generating stuff, it is taking on busy work, which might bring the ROI back to ~zero. In my business I suspect that gen ai has provided a modest productivity boost (single digit) but, due to other factors, I can’t quantify the revenue impact.

5o1ecist 7mo ago

[flagged]

fpaf 7mo ago

I'm not saying that CEOs (or devs, for that matter) lie. But on AI I don't think we can rely on any self-reported results, positive or negative, based on surveys. There is just too much incentive to say... no, to BELIEVE... both that AI yields 10x productivity that AI is useless. I am swinging wildly between the two too, personally. The more time I spend with AI, the more I am developing this split personality where one part of me says "I hope this thing blows up before I lose my job and my children never have the chance to have an office job again" and the other one says "AI is actually not easy! You have to know how to use it well, deveop tools, plan, curate your context... This means I am acquiring useful skills here, tring to port Flappy Bird to COBOL". And obviously, depending which side controls my cortex in that moment, I may err on the "AI is useless crap" or the "AI all the things!" side

evolve2k 7mo ago
I think an interesting analogy for what many of us are experiencing here is the phenomena of Doom Scrolling; deep down we know we should put it down (and go outside), but the immediate experience of it and the value it feels like it’s offering in the moment has you keep scrolling and scrolling. Similarly many have reported a sense of say programming productivity but a more objective reflection later on reveals the myriad issues with constantly and subtly heralding in large quantities of lower quality code and blowing past any caution or rigourkus discipline that would come with the laying down of lines of code “by hand”.
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  I don't know. I'm having coworkers resign due to AI mandates from upper management. Some of them are saying they are going to move on from the tech industry It's not just doom scrolling. AI is having a substantial negative impact on some people
  - eudamoniac 7mo ago
    I have also decided to do this as soon as the burden of lying about my AI usage becomes too onerous. Right now at Cisco, there are no mandates, only very strong recommendations with the explicit threat of being "left behind" if you fail to comply. Some teams have included AI usage in their personal KPIs which affect bonuses and promotions, but mine fortunately has not. Once the execs or my personal manager implement AI requirements, I'll have to start lying, which I really prefer not to do. If they start tracking, then I'll have to vibecode a script to make bullshit requests to the API each day. And if they start auditing, then I'll just check out (more than usual) and wait to be fired. They're only hurting themselves with this shit.

irenetusuq 7mo ago

[dead]

adrian-vega 7mo ago

[dead]