Dive Brief:

• Most (97%) of businesses that invest in artificial intelligence realize a return on investment, with some faring better than others, according to Ernst & Young survey findings released Tuesday.
• Organizations that commit 5% or more of their total budget toward AI see higher rates of positive returns compared with those spending less, a report on the findings said. Those in the 5% or above category also reported a rise in ROI compared with six months ago across a variety of areas, including operational efficiency, employee productivity and product innovation, it said.
• The study “suggests that there’s a bit of a learning curve in how to capture value from your AI initiatives,” Dan Diasio, EY’s global AI consulting leader, said in an interview. “The more you start to scale up and learn the appropriate ways to configure these systems, the more return you get.”

Dive Insight:

The research comes as enterprise software companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP and ServiceNow have been flooding the market with AI-enabled tools, with an emerging focus on “AI agents” capable of performing tasks on behalf of the user.

“I think it’s pretty compelling if you think about the fact that you can have these agents working 24/7 behind the scenes,” ServiceNow CFO Gina Mastantuono said last week at the UBS Global Technology and AI Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. “They don’t take vacations; they’re working when people are sleeping. It enables significant productivity, significant efficiencies.”

Worldwide information technology spending is projected to total $5.74 trillion in 2025, an increase of 9.3% from 2024, driven by AI investments, according to Gartner.

EY found that 34% of companies already investing in AI plan to spend $10 million or more on the technology next year, up from 30% six months ago.

Despite AI’s positive business impact overall, companies’ data infrastructure is becoming a bottleneck, EY said. Eighty-three percent of senior business leaders said their organization’s AI adoption would be faster if they had stronger data infrastructure in place, and two-thirds (67%) revealed that a lack of infrastructure is actively holding back their deployment of the technology.

“Data infrastructure and management are table stakes for maximizing the potential of AI, but too many organizations are falling behind,” Diasio said in a Tuesday release. “Companies urgently need to build knowledge assets, capturing their unique expertise and processes, which will prove especially important as agentic AI models come online and revolutionize how we work.”

EY polled 500 U.S. senior business leaders representing a range of industries. The survey was conducted between September 24 and October 4.