Question 1: What is AI Value?
Examine how AI creates value for organisations and stakeholders: productivity, decision making, innovation, revenue growth, experience, risk management, and competitive advantage. Dr. Kokkonen's guidance: define sustainable business value yourselves, across short, mid, and long term horizons, and across value types beyond financial (operational, trust, resiliency, adaptability).
The Widening AI Value Gap
Quantifies what value looks like when it lands: leaders post 1.7x revenue growth, 3.6x three year shareholder return, 1.6x EBIT margin vs laggards. 70% of AI's potential value sits in core business functions like R&D, sales, and manufacturing, not support functions.
The State of AI: Agents, Innovation, and Transformation
Maps value by function: revenue gains cluster in marketing and sales, strategy and corporate finance, and product development; cost gains in software engineering, manufacturing, and IT. High performers pursue growth and innovation objectives, not just cost cutting.
The Fearless Future: 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer
Macro evidence of value: productivity growth nearly quadrupled in AI exposed industries (7% to 27%), revenue per employee growing 3x faster, and a 56% wage premium for AI skilled workers. Based on nearly a billion job ads across six continents.
AI ROI: Rising Investment and Elusive Returns
Splits value by AI type and horizon: 15% see significant measurable ROI from GenAI today (quick wins), only 10% from agentic AI, with most expecting agentic returns across one to five years due to complexity.
The 2026 AI Index Report
Value at the societal level: estimated consumer surplus from GenAI in the US reached 172 billion dollars annually, with median value per user tripling year over year, mostly from free tools. Corporate AI investment doubled to 581.7 billion dollars in 2025.
Empowering Sustainability Through Collaboration
Authored by Dr. KokkonenYour sponsor on non financial value: AI enabling real time ESG monitoring, predictive analysis, transparent reporting, reputation, and long term value creation for stakeholders integrating sustainability into decisions.
Question 2: What AI Is Not
Critically evaluate common misconceptions: AI vs human intelligence, limitations of generative AI, bias and hallucinations, AI as enabler not complete solution, the continuing importance of human judgment and accountability, and the difference between technological capability and business value.
40% of Agentic AI Projects Canceled by 2027
Names agent washing: vendors rebranding chatbots, RPA, and assistants as agents without real agentic capability. Gartner estimates only about 130 of thousands of agentic vendors are real, and most current models lack the maturity to autonomously achieve complex business goals.
That Viral MIT Study? Don't Believe the Hype
Critique of how the 95% failure stat is constructed and reported. Shows the misconception cycle runs both directions: overhyping AI's power, then overhyping its failure.
Cutting Through the AI Hype
Academic synthesis showing AI theater: leaders presenting light touch initiatives to boards and investors to appear committed while lacking a real plan, often because current tech cannot deliver on unrealistic expectations.
How DXC AdvisoryX Addresses the AI Execution Gap
DXC Related CoverageFrom the DXC study: only 15% of leaders expect fully autonomous AI near term. 50% expect hybrid models with human approval on key decisions, 31% expect AI mainly assisting humans.
Global Trust Study: Reliance Without Verification
66% of users rely on AI output without evaluating accuracy and 56% have made mistakes in their work because of AI. Only 39% have received any form of AI training.
Why 40% of Agentic AI Projects May Be Canceled
Argues surviving agents will not be the ones with the biggest models but the ones with a number attached to their job and a name on the override switch. Introduces the capability deployment verification gap.
Question 3: How AI Is Perceived
Investigate perception across stakeholder groups: business leaders, employees, customers and citizens, investors, governments and regulators, and technology providers. Examine how perceptions differ between optimism, skepticism, opportunity, risk, trust, and fear.
Trust, Attitudes and Use of AI: A Global Study 2025
48,000+ people, 47 countries. 66% use AI regularly, 83% expect benefits, yet only 46% are willing to trust it, and trust has FALLEN since 2022 as adoption rose. 70% want regulation. The core dataset for citizens and employees as stakeholders.
The American Trust in AI Paradox
Employee perception in practice: half the US workforce uses AI without knowing if it is allowed, 44% knowingly use it improperly, 53% present AI output as their own. Employees are simultaneously enthusiastic adopters and governance risks.
IBM CEO Study
Leader perception: 64% of CEOs admit fear of falling behind drives investment before value is understood, yet only 37% say fast and wrong beats right and slow. 85% still expect positive ROI by 2027 despite only 25% of initiatives delivering so far.
AI Index: The Expert vs Public Perception Gap
Documents a roughly 50 point gap between AI experts (73% positive) and the US public on AI's impact on work. Nearly two thirds of Americans expect AI to reduce jobs over 20 years. Only 31% of Americans trust their government to regulate AI, lowest of all countries surveyed.
The GenAI Divide: The Shadow AI Economy
Over 90% of firms have employees using personal AI tools even when official pilots fail. Workers perceive value the organization cannot capture; a manufacturing COO: the hype says everything changed, in our operations nothing fundamental has shifted.
The New Governance: 10 Trends
Authored by Dr. KokkonenKokkonen on investor and regulator perception: shareholders and regulators seeking greater insight into board oversight, customers and employees entitled to understand organizational principles, and transparency as a cultural expectation.
Question 4: Why Businesses Struggle to Derive Value from AI
Explore why organisations fail to achieve expected outcomes: data quality, legacy tech, unclear objectives, skills gaps, governance and ethics, organizational resistance, hype driven expectations, ROI measurement difficulty, and scaling beyond pilots.
Global Study: The AI Execution Gap
DXC Published ResearchYour sponsor's answer: 94% face significant challenges deploying at scale, 65% cannot build a clear business case, and adoption is driven by board pressure rather than outcomes. Five interconnected execution challenges: strategy, deployment focus, leadership alignment, organizational readiness, technical capability.
The GenAI Divide: The Learning Gap
The 95% failure rate traces to a learning gap, not model quality: tools that cannot retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve. Budgets skew to visible sales and marketing pilots while ROI lives in back office. External partnerships succeed about twice as often as internal builds.
Workflow Redesign: The Missing Ingredient
Fundamental workflow redesign correlates most strongly with EBIT impact, yet only about 21% of adopters have redesigned any workflow. Nearly 80% layer AI on top of existing processes. Nearly two thirds have not begun scaling enterprise wide.
The 10-20-70 Rule
BCG's prescription for why efforts fail: companies invert the ratio, spending on algorithms and tech while starving the 70% that matters, people and processes. Future built firms plan to train over half their workforce in AI; laggards about a fifth.
Escalating Costs, Unclear Value, Weak Risk Controls
The three named killers behind the 40% agentic cancellation prediction. Most projects are hype driven early experiments deployed without strategy, without understanding complexity, and without governance for when things go wrong.
State of AI in the Enterprise 2026
The AI skills gap is the top integration barrier, and companies responded with education rather than role or workflow redesign. Only one in five has mature agentic governance. Only 34% are truly reimagining the business despite rising impact reports.
Disconnected Technology and Siloed Organizations
50% of CEOs say rapid AI investment produced disconnected technology. Top innovation barriers named: lack of collaboration across silos, aversion to risk and disruption, and lack of expertise. Only 16% of initiatives scaled enterprise wide.
Companies Avoid Friction
The 5% who succeed design for friction: deep workflow embedding, memory, learning loops. The 95% chase frictionless generic tools that demo well and collapse in the field. Includes the insurer case where the official pilot failed while shadow AI thrived.
Cross Cutting: International Business Perspective
How adoption, regulation, investment, and maturity differ across regions, required framing for the whole report rather than a standalone question.
Adoption and Investment by Country
GenAI at 53% global adoption in three years. Singapore 61% and UAE 64% overperform; the US ranks 24th at 28.3% despite dominating investment (roughly 23x China in private capital). US and Chinese model performance has effectively converged.
Regional Maturity and Agentic Adoption
North America slightly ahead on most adoption metrics, APAC next, Europe behind: agentic experimentation at 51% NA, 45% APAC, 41% Europe, while APAC allocates the largest AI budget share to agents.
Trust by Country: 47 Nation Breakdown
Country by country trust, use, and attitude data vs global benchmarks. Emerging economies generally show higher trust and optimism than advanced economies.
Regulatory Trust by Region
Low trust in government AI regulation in the US, much of Europe, and Japan; higher trust in parts of Asia and South America. Globally the EU is trusted to regulate AI more than the US or China.
Europe and Middle East ROI View
1,854 executives across Europe and the Middle East: CEO led AI agendas emerging, 95% of ROI leaders allocating over 10% of tech budget to AI, and agentic returns expected over longer horizons.
APA Reference List (7th Edition)
Copy straight into the report. Entries are alphabetized with hanging indents. Verify publication dates against each source before final submission, and swap press release citations for full report citations where your team downloads the underlying PDF.
Boston Consulting Group. (2025, September). The widening AI value gap: Build for the future 2025. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2025/are-you-generating-value-from-ai-the-widening-gap
California Management Review. (2025, June). Cutting through the AI hype: The facts leaders need to know about GenAI adoption and return on investment. University of California, Berkeley. https://cmr.berkeley.edu/assets/documents/pdf/2025-06-cutting-through-the-ai-hype-the-facts-leaders-need-to-know-about-genai-adoption-and-return-on-investment.pdf
Deloitte. (2025, October). AI ROI: The paradox of rising investment and elusive returns. https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/issues/generative-ai/ai-roi-the-paradox-of-rising-investment-and-elusive-returns.html
Deloitte AI Institute. (2026). The state of AI in the enterprise: 2026 report. Deloitte. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/what-we-do/capabilities/applied-artificial-intelligence/content/state-of-ai-in-the-enterprise.html
DXC Technology. (2025). What's in store for banking in 2025? https://dxc.com/insights/knowledge-base/whats-in-store-for-banking-in-2025
DXC Technology. (2025, December 10). DXC launches AdvisoryX and releases new global insights on the AI execution gap [Press release]. PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dxc-launches-advisoryx-and-releases-new-global-insights-on-the-ai-execution-gap-302637011.html
DXC Technology. (2026, April 16). DXC expands Consulting & Engineering Services leadership to scale AI-led growth [Press release]. https://dxc.com/newsroom/04162026-dxc-expands-consulting-and-engineering-services-leadership-to-scale-ai-led-growth
Gartner. (2025, June 25). Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by end of 2027 [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027
Gillespie, N., Lockey, S., Ward, T., Macdade, A., & Hassed, G. (2025). Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence: A global study 2025. The University of Melbourne and KPMG. https://doi.org/10.26188/28822919
IBM Institute for Business Value. (2025, May 6). IBM study: CEOs double down on AI while navigating enterprise hurdles [Press release]. IBM Newsroom. https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-05-06-ibm-study-ceos-double-down-on-ai-while-navigating-enterprise-hurdles
KPMG US. (2025, April 29). The American trust in AI paradox: Adoption outpaces governance [Press release]. https://kpmg.com/us/en/media/news/trust-in-ai-2025.html
Kokkonen, A. (n.d.). Reimagining outsourcing: Rethink, realign, reinvent. DXC Technology. https://dxc.com/au/en/insights/perspectives/paper/reimagining-outsourcing
Kokkonen, A. (n.d.). Ten trends shaping 2024's corporate dialogue. DXC Technology. https://dxc.com/au/en/insights/technical-debt/ten-trends-shaping-2024s-corporate-dialogue
Kokkonen, A. (n.d.). The new governance: 10 trends. DXC Technology. https://dxc.com/us/en/insights/perspectives/article/the-new-governance-10-trends
Kokkonen, A., & Krohn, M. (n.d.). Empowering sustainability efforts through strong collaborative relationships. DXC Technology. https://dxc.com/sg/en/insights/perspectives/paper/empowering-sustainability-efforts-through-strong-collaborative-relationships
Marketing AI Institute. (2025, November 3). That viral MIT study claiming 95% of AI pilots fail? Don't believe the hype. https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/mit-study-ai-pilots
McKinsey & Company. (2025). The state of AI: Agents, innovation, and transformation. QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai
MIT NANDA Initiative. (2025). The GenAI divide: State of AI in business 2025. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Summary reported in Fortune: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mit-report-95-generative-ai-105412686.html)
PwC. (2025, June 3). The fearless future: 2025 global AI jobs barometer [Press release]. https://pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2025/ai-linked-to-a-fourfold-increase-in-productivity-growth.html
Snyder, J. (2025, August 26). MIT finds 95% of GenAI pilots fail because companies avoid friction. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonsnyder/2025/08/26/mit-finds-95-of-genai-pilots-fail-because-companies-avoid-friction/
Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. (2026). The 2026 AI index report. Stanford University. https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report
Strickland, E. (2026, June 2). Stanford's AI index for 2026 shows the state of AI. IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/state-of-ai-index-2026
Szczerba, R. J. (2026, July 7). Why 40% of agentic AI projects may be canceled by 2027. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2026/07/07/why-40-of-agentic-ai-projects-may-be-canceled-by-2027/
Technology Magazine. (2025, December). How DXC AdvisoryX aims to address the AI execution gap. https://technologymagazine.com/news/how-dxc-advisoryx-aims-to-address-the-ai-execution-gap