This month in AI - January 2026

​Welcome to the January 2026 edition of "This Month in AI." This month’s research makes one thing clear: AI has moved from experimentation into the core of enterprise strategy. Investment is accelerating, CEO ownership is rising, and ambition is widespread. What now separates leaders from laggards is not access to AI—but the ability to operationalize it.

​Here’s what’s making news this month:

​AI investment isn’t just growing — CEOs are driving it

​AI is no longer treated as speculative innovation spend. According to Boston Consulting Group’s AI Radar 2026 survey of more than 2,300 executives (including 640 CEOs), artificial intelligence is being institutionalized as a CEO-owned growth priority.

Nearly three-quarters of CEOs now identify as the primary decision-maker for AI—up sharply from last year. This shift signals that AI has moved beyond technology roadmaps into the realm of enterprise strategy and accountability.

CEO optimism is rising alongside investment. About 80% report greater confidence in AI ROI than a year ago, and more than 90% of companies plan to maintain or increase AI spending even if returns take time to materialize. Average AI investment is expected to more than double in 2026, reaching roughly 1.7% of revenue, with spending spanning infrastructure, data architecture, and workforce enablement.

BCG’s segmentation of CEOs highlights a widening performance gap. Trailblazers—roughly 15% of leaders—are embedding AI deeply across workflows, aggressively upskilling their workforce, and prioritizing agentic AI. These organizations report measurable gains in productivity, decision speed, and quality, reinforcing a virtuous cycle of confidence and adoption.

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If BCG highlights conviction and capital commitment, other research shows that conviction alone isn’t enough.
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CEOs are thinking bigger about AI

​Chief Executive’s The CEOs Thinking Bigger With AI shows a growing cohort of leaders treating AI not as an optimization tool, but as a foundational business platform. These CEOs are integrating AI directly into operations, products, and decision-making—reshaping how their organizations compete.

Instead of isolated pilots, companies have committed significant capital and aligned the organization around AI-driven transformation. By pairing investment with broad employee enablement, these leaders have enabled hundreds of AI initiatives, many of which have already scaled into daily operations.

The strategic shift is clear. AI is increasingly used to redesign workflows, accelerate decisions, and unlock new revenue streams—not just to reduce costs. Leaders who succeed are reframing AI as a mechanism for reinvention rather than efficiency alone.

Crucially, leadership behavior matters. CEOs who actively engage with AI initiatives, normalize experimentation, and tolerate early missteps create cultures that move faster from ideas to execution. Hesitation and incrementalism, not speed, is emerging as the greater risk.

Yet ambition without execution creates its own challenge—making operational readiness the real differentiator.
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​Execution is now the real test

​Harvard Business Review How Executives Are Thinking About AI in 2026 survey confirms that AI is firmly established as a strategic priority across enterprises. Most organizations are increasing investment, formalizing AI leadership roles, and reporting greater value realization than in previous years.

This signals that AI is becoming institutionalized. However, ownership models remain fragmented, with AI reporting lines varying widely across organizations. This lack of clarity slows decision-making and diffuses accountability.

Most notably, executives overwhelmingly point to human and organizational factors as the dominant barriers to AI success. Issues such as workforce readiness, change management, and cultural alignment now outweigh technical challenges. Upskilling and reskilling have become strategic imperatives rather than optional initiatives.

Even with these issues, optimism about AI’s long-term impact remains strong. A significant majority of survey respondents believe AI will be one of the most transformational technologies of a generation and that its overall effect will be positive over time. Most leaders expect that continued investment in AI will not only improve efficiency but also support new business models and competitive advantage.

The narrative emerging from the HBR survey is that AI adoption is real and accelerating. Leaders are no longer asking whether AI matters; they are asking how to capture real value from it at scale. The shift from experimentation toward production deployment has begun, but the pace of transformation depends less on technology and more on how well organizations align culture, people, and processes with strategic AI goals.​

The constraint is no longer access to AI. It is organizational alignment.

Deloitte’s findings reinforce this growing gap between access and activation.
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From ambition to activation

According to Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 report, organizations are moving beyond early experiments with AI toward broader deployment and strategic investment, but most have yet to unlock its full transformative potential. The findings are based on a global survey of more than 3,200 business and IT leaders spanning C-suite, director, and senior leadership roles across six major industries.

“Across the enterprise, we’re seeing massive ambition around AI, with organizations starting to pivot from experimentation to integrating AI into the core of the business with a focus on scale and impact. As organizations look to unlock AI’s full value, leaders should enable enterprise value by consciously weaving AI into the fabric of their business workflows and through the better coupling of people and machine intelligence.” – Nitin Mittal, Deloitte Global AI leader

Roughly 60% of employees now have sanctioned AI tools—a dramatic increase year over year. Yet fewer than 60% of those with access use AI regularly, highlighting a persistent activation gap.

AI experimentation is widespread, but production adoption remains uneven. While many organizations expect to scale a significant share of AI initiatives in the coming months, only a minority have already embedded AI into core workflows. Most companies are still using AI to enhance existing processes rather than fundamentally redesigning them.

This divide is especially visible in talent and workflow design. While organizations focus heavily on AI education and fluency, far fewer are rethinking jobs, roles, and career paths around AI capabilities. Skills gaps remain the most frequently cited barrier to deeper integration.

Deloitte also highlights emerging strategic differentiators. Sovereign AI is influencing vendor selection as organizations prioritize governance, trust, and regulatory alignment. Physical AI adoption is accelerating, particularly in manufacturing and logistics. At the same time, agentic AI is advancing faster than governance models, creating new execution and risk-management challenges

In short, AI has moved from promise toward real enterprise scale, but leaders must accelerate activation, talent transformation, and governance if they want to turn early gains into lasting competitive advantage.

​Across these reports, a consistent pattern emerges: AI investment is accelerating, CEO ownership is increasing, and enterprise ambition is high. But durable advantage will depend less on enthusiasm and more on execution discipline — governance, workforce design, workflow redesign, and strategic clarity. The next competitive divide will not be access to AI. It will be operational maturity.

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That’s it for the January edition of This Month In AI. We hope you enjoyed the read.

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