AI Budgets Double. The Decision Moves to the CEO.
Global companies plan to double AI investment this year, reaching an average of 1.7% of sales. Nearly every firm (94%) says they'll keep funding AI even if returns don't show up this year. Only 6% plan to cut. That makes AI an irreversible choice, not a side bet.
Leadership has shifted. Seventy-two percent of CEOs now call themselves the primary decision-maker for AI-roughly twice last year's share. Half say the success or failure of AI strategy is tied to their job stability. This is now squarely a CEO agenda.
What the BCG survey found
BCG's AI Radar 2026, based on 2,360 executives and senior leaders, shows a clear pattern: investment up, accountability up, patience for ROI intact. CEOs report higher confidence than any other executive group in their readiness to lead AI transformation and in their understanding of how their roles must change.
Source: BCG: Artificial Intelligence
Regional signal: confidence vs. catch-up
Confidence in AI outcomes is highest in India (76%), Greater China (73%), and Japan (70%). In the U.S. (52%) and the U.K. (44%), many leaders invest to avoid falling behind competitors more than out of conviction. Greater China, Japan, the Middle East, and Africa are also spending more aggressively than Western peers.
Agentic AI moves to the front
Agentic AI-systems that operate with autonomy-has become the key variable. About 90% of CEOs expect strong ROI from Agentic AI by 2026. Over 30% of total AI budgets are already flowing there, and leaders allocate more than half of their AI spend to it.
Talent over tools
What separates leaders isn't tooling; it's the speed of organizational transformation. AI leaders allocate ~60% of their AI budgets to reskilling and upskilling. Laggards spend 24%, and typical companies spend 27%. Capability building is the unlock.
What executives should do next
- Set the CEO mandate: Name 3-5 business outcomes for AI (cost to serve, cycle time, revenue per rep, customer retention). Tie each to owners and deadlines.
- Rebalance the portfolio: Keep foundational hygiene (data, security, governance) funded, but shift 30-50% of new spend into Agentic AI pilots that touch revenue or cost directly.
- Pick workflows, not demos: Target repetitive, rules-heavy processes with clear handoffs: claims intake, collections, KYC review, sales follow-up, procurement triage.
- Design for control: Put human-in-the-loop checkpoints, audit trails, and rollback paths into every agent from day one.
- Fund skills at scale: Move budget from generic tools into role-specific capability: product owners, data stewards, prompt and agent designers, AI PMs, and change leads.
90-day execution plan
- Weeks 1-2: Approve 3 target workflows and a standardized guardrail pack (data access, approval thresholds, logging, incident response).
- Weeks 3-6: Launch Agentic AI pilots with strict success criteria (e.g., "reduce handle time 25% with no quality dip"). Start baseline measurement.
- Weeks 7-10: Train cross-functional teams tied to those pilots; shift SMEs into product squads; codify SOPs for human override.
- Weeks 11-13: Scale the winner to a second business unit; kill or fix the rest. Publish a quarterly AI P&L and control report to the board.
Metrics that keep everyone honest
- Value: Cost-out per workflow, cycle-time reduction, revenue lift per rep or per visit.
- Adoption: % of tasks handled by agents, user satisfaction, fallback rate to humans.
- Risk: Hallucination/exception rate, policy violations, model drift alerts, data access incidents.
- Capability: % of staff certified on AI tools relevant to their role, time to deploy a new agent, share of budget in reskilling (target ~50-60%).
Where to upskill your teams
Your lead indicator is training penetration by role. If your budget mix looks like the leaders (~60% into people), you'll move faster with fewer surprises. For structured, role-based programs, see AI courses by job.
The takeaway: the tech is available, budgets are flowing, and CEOs are on the hook. The gap now is organizational speed-how fast you can turn pilots into operating advantage without losing control.
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