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ZDNET Highlights
- Analysts said that AI will enter a new stage in 2026.
- Businesses will take better advantage of technology and see results.
- AI agents and commerce opportunities will be prominent.
The AI hype has been accelerated by the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. However, organizations are not yet seeing much ROI on their increased investments in technology – but experts say the wait may be over in the new year.
Based on the promise of AI’s ability to dramatically optimize operations through new developments in the space, including models that are smarter, cheaper, multimodal, better at reasoning, and even autonomous, business leaders have poured money into related spending. Global corporate AI investment to reach $252.3 billion in 2024, and US private AI investment to reach $109.1 billion. stanford data –It’s safe to assume that these numbers will continue to grow.
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But a look to 2025 reveals a common thread: AI’s potential to dramatically optimize operations has not yet been realized across the board. Most memorably, the now infamous MIT study found that 95% of businesses were not seeing ROI from their generative AI spend, with only 5% of integrated AI pilots extracting millions in value. While the return criteria are narrowly defined, which partly explains the high percentage, it is still indicative of a broader trend.
“So far, a small group of leaders have turned AI into big value – new revenue pools, new business models and real valuation premiums – while most others have settled for ‘respectable but modest’ returns,” said Dan Priest, PwC’s US chief AI officer.
Still, Priest says he thinks the AI price gap will finally begin to narrow in the new year, a position shared by almost every expert ZDNET spoke to.
Change in ROI
Pujari attributed this upcoming expansion primarily to the precision that CEOs and other business leaders must bring to their AI projects by identifying a few high-impact areas where AI can “reshape the economics of business” and pursue them with focus.
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China Widener, Deloitte vice president and US TMT industry leader, echoed this sentiment, claiming that the coming year will see a shift from “heavy AI investments that were stuck in pilots” to meaningful changes for enterprises.
“In 2026, competitive advantage will come not just from adopting AI, but from orchestrating it – from converting innovation into sustained ROI and new forms of business value,” Widener said.
Application on development
It is noteworthy that in both of these predictions, experts highlight that the change is not in the development of the technology itself, but in how business leaders implement AI in their businesses. How will that be accomplished? There are several key considerations for businesses, starting with the adoption of AI agents.
For example, Widener suggests that embracing the agentic capabilities of AI will help business leaders meaningfully rethink how teams work, as well as how they operate and generate growth.
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In theory, the value of AI agents to businesses is simple: These AI assistants can perform tasks that humans can, but without human limitations (such as the need for breaks), while also collaborating with each other to complete tasks efficiently. However, implementing that reality in practice is somewhat more challenging.
AI Agent
Many people described 2025 as the year of AI agents. Yet, as Deloitte’s Tech Trends report this week revealed, the technology didn’t take off this year despite all the hype and promise.
Specifically, Deloitte’s 2025 Emerging Technology Trends study, which surveyed 500 US tech leaders, found that 30% of organizations surveyed are exploring agentic options, 38% are piloting solutions and only 14% have solutions ready for deployment. The number of organizations actively using the system in production is even lower, 11%.
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Gartner has released similar data Saying that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to factors such as rising costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls. Nevertheless, Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran coined 2026 as the year of “driving AI agents.”
“Although AI agents are becoming increasingly common in the form of pilot projects, most enterprises are struggling to move them into production,” Chandrasekaran said. “Ensuring a robust control plane for managing the agent lifecycle, establishing governance to secure, red-team, validate, and inspect agents, and building stateful multi-agent systems are all key goal posts for the industry to improve upon in 2026.”
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The company is also excited about the value AI agents will bring to businesses. Prediction At least 15% of daily work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028, up from 0% in 2024.
agent commerce
AI agents have the potential to not only optimize internal business operations, but also improve the way people perform everyday tasks. For example, one of the hottest topics related to AI agents is AI for commerce.
In its simplest use case, AI agents can help users select the product they need and add the item to their cart. In their ideal case, AI agents would be able to complete transactions on behalf of users, which could come in handy when purchasing a product at a certain price point or avoiding tedious tasks like booking travel.
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The latter, more advanced use cases may be possible in 2026, according to Ken Moore, MasterCard’s chief innovation officer.
“In 2026, two powerful forces will converge – AI-powered autonomy and the growth of trust – as agentic commerce moves from early adoption to scale,” Moore said. “Consumers will shift from manual operators to strategic orchestrators, delegating routine decisions like replenishment or travel booking to AI.”
Education and upskilling
Beyond agents, a central puzzle of how businesses will successfully implement AI is proper education. Forrester estimates that by 2026, 30% of large enterprises will make AI fluency training mandatory to drive AI adoption and reduce risk.
This is a big departure from what we have seen so far. Deloitte found that only 7% of AI spending goes to changing culture and training and learning. One October 2025 Wharton study It also found that investment in training is slowing, falling by eight percentage points year on year.
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This lack of adoption is a barrier to successful AI implementation, with Forrester data showing that 21% of AI decision-makers cite employee experience and readiness as a barrier to adoption. Kim Harrington, senior analyst at Forrester, said an improperly trained workforce is a recipe for risk.
“AI runs on data and employees shape that data every day (often without realizing it),” he said. “Poor literacy and fluency leads to poor input or behavior, which translates into flawed decisions or poorly trained AI models that can rapidly access misinformation.”
Harrington said mandatory training would help remind employees that AI outputs are capable of making mistakes, as well as how to best use them, which could also increase their confidence in using the tool.
Time
While a lot of predictions of AI delivery for 2026 seem to hinge on AI agents, it is worth guarding against expectations, as the change will not happen overnight or be seamless.
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“Agents will still be imperfect, and that’s OK,” Priest said. “The difference in 2026 is that more companies will have real benchmarks, clear guardrails, and a repeatable playbook. Combined with a tight, top-down focus on where agents are deployed, this is what will move agentic AI from experimentation to real enterprise transformation.”
