While business leaders’ enthusiasm for AI appears to be unwavering, only a few are scaling fast enough to turn their spend into real business value, according to new findings from KPMG.

Polling more than 2,200 C‑suite and senior execs around the world, the firm’s latest Global AI Pulse report found that business leaders plan to invest a weighted global average of $186 million in AI over the next twelve months, with 74% saying AI will remain a top priority even in the event of a recession.

This investment frenzy is being fuelled by the need to find meaningful value, with the study showing that, while AI is delivering ROI, it is only for those who scale it across the organisation.

A clear gap exists between those firms still in the experimentation phase and those that have moved beyond pilots to full deployment, with KPMG identifying only a small group of ‘AI leaders’ (11%) seeing clear returns by scaling AI across functions and beginning to coordinate AI agents across workflows.

These leaders consistently outperform those further behind, with 82% of AI leaders agreeing that the tech is delivering meaningful value, compared to 62% of their laggard peers. 

KPMG argues that this is not simply an AI maturity gap, but a widening performance gap between organisations that treat AI as an enterprise-wide transformation and those that try to bolt AI onto existing systems and tools, resulting in incremental gains.

The survey found AI leaders are rolling out AI agents across core functions, specifically within technology and IT (66% ) to accelerate code development, in operations (55%) to orchestrate supply‑chain workflows, and in marketing and sales (43% ) to power personalised customer experiences.

The real shift, however, lies in how these agents are being deployed, with leading firms moving beyond simple task automation and using them to coordinate work across functions, routing decisions, surfacing organisation‑wide insights, and detecting potential issues early.

KPMG also found that AI leaders are more confident in managing AI risks, with maturity closely tied to the ability to scale governance alongside the technology itself.

While concerns about data security, privacy, and risk are generally widespread (75%), among those still experimenting with AI, only 20% feel confident managing AI‑related risks. That confidence rises sharply to 49% among AI leaders, suggesting that governance frameworks strengthen as AI becomes embedded into real‑world operations. 

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Rather than worrying about early experimentation, AI leaders’ concerns shift to the challenges that come with scaling, such as data quality, governance and sustainability, and increased competition from AI‑native entrants.

“The first Global AI Pulse results reinforce that spending more on AI is not the same as creating value,” said Steve Chase, global head of AI and digital innovation at KPMG International.

“Leading organisations are moving beyond enablement, deploying AI agents to reimagine processes and reshape decisions and workflows across the enterprise. But ultimately, there is no agentic future without trust and no trust without governance that keeps pace.”