#ai-adoption

#ai-adoption

We are entering a new phase that is much more employer-centric in terms of who holds the keys,

"There was this emerging bragging right around the number of agents I had or I have in production," he said. "I think that's probably the wrong measure." The value of AI deployment is better measured by the quality - not the quantity - of agents, he said. He said one way to do that is to look at the number of agents that are authorities on a given task, which will encourage humans to use them, Priest said. The other is to evaluate the number of humans using those agents to execute tasks to achieve a prioritized outcome for a company.

The gap between what large corporations can do with technology and what small businesses can afford has been shrinking for years. But in 2026, that gap has nearly closed entirely when it comes to artificial intelligence. Tools that would have cost six figures to develop five years ago are now available for less than £50 per month. The question for UK SMEs is no longer whether they can afford to use AI, but whether they can afford not to.

Speaking with Fortune at Davos, PwC Global Chairman Mohamed Kande argued that the shortfall is not about AI's capability, but execution, noting that many companies "forgot the basics," including clean data, disciplined processes, and governance. The takeaway many leaders are drawing is that AI is failing to live up to expectations. That conclusion is wrong. The problem is not the technology. It is how leaders are framing the opportunity and how they are measuring success.

One explanation that came up again and again was incomplete adoption among employees. Many professionals are understandably worried about what these tools will mean for their jobs, or at least skeptical of their usefulness as AI slop abounds. To bulldoze through this hesitation, bosses have stepped up the pressure, making AI use mandatory and incorporating it into performance reviews. But a number of executives at the roundtable advised against strong-arming.

Some 12% of employed adults say they use AI daily in their job, according to a Gallup Workforce survey conducted this fall of more than 22,000 U.S. workers. The survey found roughly one-quarter say they use AI at least frequently, which is defined as at least a few times a week, and nearly half say they use it at least a few times a year.

Shares of Amazon ( NASDAQ:AMZN) are up 0.5% this week, but retail investor sentiment tells a darker story. The company's social sentiment score dropped to negative 0.15 on Reddit and X over the past week, a sharp reversal from its neutral-bullish 0.12 average over the prior quarter. Among select tech peers, Amazon stands alone in sustained bearish sentiment while companies like NVIDIA ( NASDAQ:NVDA), Alphabet ( NASDAQ:GOOGL), Meta Platforms ( NASDAQ:META), and Apple ( NASDAQ:AAPL) enjoy bullish or neutral enthusiasm from the retail crowd.

Results of the survey, conducted in April, have been compiled into GitLab's 2024 Global DevSecOps Report, which was announced June 25. Among the findings, 78% of respondents said they are currently using AI in software development or plan to in the next two years, an increase from 64% of respondents who said they were using or planning to use AI in development last year.

Big companies are busy hiring chief AI officers and setting up tiger teams to pilot agentic products. However, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman says this overlooks where automation actually pays off - in the "unglamorous layer" of day-to-day work. Speaking with AI engineer Parth Patil on his "Possible" podcast, Hoffman said a company's AI transformation involves employees "being able to talk to each other about it and do collective learning."

"For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread," Nadella said, as quoted by the FT. The "tell-tale sign of if it's a bubble," he added, would be if only tech companies were benefitting from the rise of AI. He gave the example of a pharmaceutical company using AI to accelerate drug trials;

Hiring in 2026 won't look much like hiring even two years ago. If you don't pay attention, you will get left behind. I was a retained search consultant for 25-plus years. I've written executive and board résumés for the last 10 years. I've never seen so much change in candidate sourcing happen so quickly. CEO priorities and expectations have shifted. AI is reshaping how candidates get surfaced. Résumé sameness has skyrocketed. Candidate shortlist cycles have accelerated.

planning to or are already using AI.

When ChatGPT was first released to the world at the end of 2022, Kristin Ginn, the product marketing lead for AI adoption and usage at Microsoft and founder of the consultancy TrnsfrmAItn, started playing around with it. She explored how she could use AI both at work and in her personal life, and realized just how powerful the technology would be.

In the fall, roughly three years after generative artificial intelligence tools went mainstream and some higher education institutions began partnering with tech companies, researchers surveyed 1,960 staff, administrators and faculty across more than 1,800 public and private institutions about AI's relationship to their work. Ninety-two percent of respondents said their institution has a work-related AI strategy-which includes piloting AI tools, evaluating both opportunities and risks and encouraging use of AI tools. And while the vast majority of respondents (89 percent) said they aren't required to use AI tools for work, 86 percent said they want to or will continue to use AI tools in the future.

In his telling, AI has yet to graduate from pilot programs into anything that materially reshapes how marketing departments are staffed, structured or paid. Until that changes, agency chiefs can stop bracing for a shift to outcome-based compensation. CMOs, he said, are still buying time and headcount. "Without naming names, I can remember a real situation where the marketer said 'of course we'll move to an output model' and then you get into a conversation with their procurement people and they're just worried about getting caught out," he continued. Which, in plain terms, means they're worried about paying agencies more than they have to.

Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, value from AI investments has been slow to emerge and worries that we're in an AI bubble are growing. Yet according to responses to this year's annual AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey, companies are undaunted. Virtually every data and AI leader participating in this year's survey believes that AI is a high priority for their organization, has plans to spend more on it, and confirms that their company is getting measurable business value from their AI investments.

AI often sparks strong reactions, with people predicting either a near-term utopia - or the end of the world as we know it. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy told Business Insider that individuals on the hype end of the spectrum tend to jump quickly to promises of unlimited prosperity. The CEO said that the other extreme includes those who believe AI will lead to a doomsday scenario.

despite one person in six now using generative AI (genAI) tools, there exists what it described as a "widening divide." The adoption rate in nations that are situated in the region known as the Global North, a term used for developed nations regardless of their geographic location, is at 24.7% of the working age population, far higher than the 14.1% figure in the Global South, those countries either under development or least developed.

"What is AI? How are we going to provide training to both the developers and the trainers - train the trainers, if you will - and employees? What areas can we leverage AI? What risks [are there] with AI?"