Dive Brief:

• Nearly seven in 10 corporate executives responding to a recent KPMG survey said they plan to invest between $50 million to $250 million in generative artificial intelligence over the next 12 months, up from 45% in first quarter 2024 poll results.
• The Big Four accounting firm’s latest study also found that half of business leaders are currently scaling their generative AI deployments.
• “Businesses are moving from experimentation and research and development into actually putting the AI out there and expecting outcomes,” Todd Lohr, head of ecosystems at KPMG’s U.S. advisory division, said in an interview. 

Dive Insight:

The research comes as analysts are predicting that 2025 will be a pivotal year for generative AI adoption among enterprises, as C-suite leaders encounter a new wave of tools and innovations while also facing return-on-investment pressures.

“Obvious use cases that enterprises experimented with last year are now table stakes and embedded in business software,” Forrester Research said in its 2025 technology and security predictions report. “Leaders are realizing that ROI from investments will take longer than they anticipated and are shifting toward pragmatically delivering ROI over time.”

Investor pressure to demonstrate ROI on generative AI investments is “important or very important” for 68% of business leaders, KPMG found in its latest survey.

The coming year brings an opportunity to scale and advance AI capabilities across the enterprise, and a majority of organizations are looking to AI agents — tools that can work independently to perform tasks and adapt in real time — to help do so, KPMG said in a release announcing the research. Over half (51%) of organizations are exploring the use of AI agents and another 37% are piloting them, the survey found.  

The study analyzed companies’ generative AI investment plans across different spending ranges, with mixed results. Nearly half (49%) of respondents said they plan to spend between $50 million to $100 million on the technology over the next 12 months, compared with 23% in the Q1 2024 poll. Only 2% said they will spend $250 million or above this year, down from 21%. Meanwhile, 8% of leaders said they plan to spend less than $10 million, down from 14%.

“There was a pretty big jump in that sweet spot of $50 million to $100 million,” Lohr told CFO Dive. 

KPMG surveyed 100 U.S.-based C-suite and business leaders representing organizations with an annual revenue of $1 billion or more.