CEOs plan more tech spending as 44% struggle to show AI returns

Gartner put a number on the boardroom’s discomfort with AI on 20 October. Forty-four percent of chief executives struggle to demonstrate AI-driven financial returns to stakeholders, according to the 2027 Gartner CEO Survey, released at the firm’s IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando. The same survey found that 75% plan to increase technology investment and 80% said technology has become strategy.

The survey is Gartner’s own, conducted in April and May 2026 among 203 global CEOs and senior business executives, and Gartner sells the research and advisory services that companies buy to close exactly this kind of gap. The sample is small and global. Its direction still carries weight, because it matches what the firm’s analysts said from the keynote stage a day earlier.

Read together, the figures describe plans to raise technology budgets that rest on belief rather than evidence. Close to half of the executives who answered struggle to show stakeholders that AI pays, and three-quarters of the same sample plan to spend more on technology regardless.

The boardroom question about AI has moved from whether to adopt it to whether anyone can prove it pays. Gartner’s answer is that the proof will not come from the tools. “The AI value problem will not be solved by simply adding more AI to existing ways of working,” said David Furlonger, a distinguished vice-president analyst at Gartner. That moves the burden onto how a business is organized, which is a slower and costlier conversation than which licenses to buy.

Belief is carrying the budget

For SMB and mid-market firms the gap bites sooner than it does for large enterprises. A multinational can carry an unproven AI line through several budget cycles. A business whose board meets quarterly and whose AI spend sits in the same few lines as hiring and capital investment feels the absence of a return at the next budget round.

The 80% figure changes who owns that problem. If technology is strategy, a stalled AI program is a strategy failure rather than an IT overrun, and it lands with the managing director and the board rather than with the supplier. Gartner’s release said technology decisions now sit “at the center of conversations about growth, competitiveness and enterprise direction”.

Operating model redesign comes first

Asked what would accelerate tangible financial returns from AI through 2027, 63% of the CEOs named radically redesigning the operating model as a top move. Fifty-two percent cited aggressively deploying AI agents as employees and 47% cited reallocating capital through significant business restructuring.

Gartner’s recommendations sit alongside that ranking. The firm said CIOs should redesign workflows around AI, build modular architectures that allow a company to change direction and switch providers, and measure business outcomes rather than AI activity. Furlonger described it as a change of brief: “For CIOs, that means shifting the conversation from deploying AI to redesigning how the enterprise creates value.”

The measurement point bears most directly on the 44%. Licenses issued, pilots launched and prompts run describe activity, and none of them is a financial return of the kind those chief executives say they struggle to show. Gartner listed unit economics, decision velocity, speed to market, customer outcomes and business impact among the measures it means.

Agents are arriving ahead of governance

Gartner’s keynote release, issued on 19 October, adds a second gap. Daryl Plummer, a vice-president, distinguished analyst and Gartner fellow, said 58% of leaders reported “some positive value from their AI initiatives”, citing a Q2 2026 Gartner survey of more than 1,000 functional leaders. He also said many organizations “are struggling to consistently replicate and scale that value across the enterprise”.

Kristin Moyer, who holds the same title, cited a further Gartner survey of more than 2,000 CIOs and technology executives in Q2 2026: 71% of organizations expect to deploy agentic AI within the next 12 months, while only 21% have agentic AI governance capabilities in place. A third Gartner survey, of 303 CIOs and IT risk management leaders in Q3 2026, found that 25% of CIOs align technology and business risk.

Agents differ from chat assistants in that they act on their own: they send messages, update records and trigger payments and approvals inside a firm’s systems. Deploying them ahead of governance adds operational risk in pursuit of a return the business has not yet measured. In a smaller company that risk usually sits with a director who signed off the project rather than with a dedicated risk team.

Gartner’s proposed answer is an “AI Central Bank”, a virtual control plane for AI decision making across the enterprise. Plummer was clear about what it does not cover: “What it will not do is eliminate risk, and it will not drive value.”

Gartner’s two releases move the AI conversation in the boardroom from adoption to proof, and they place the shortfall inside the business: in its workflows, its measures and its controls. For mid-market boards, three-quarters of chief executives plan to raise technology spending while 44% struggle to show an AI return, and the firm that sells the research says adding more AI to existing ways of working will not close that gap.