Enterprise spending on artificial intelligence reached $407 billion in 2026, a 34.8 percent increase over the prior year, as companies poured budget into tools, infrastructure, and talent. The figure sits inside a far larger worldwide AI market that is forecast to reach roughly $2.5 trillion in 2026, up from $1.5 trillion in 2025.

Production use has widened. By the first quarter of 2026, 72 percent of enterprises had at least one AI workload in production, up from 55 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2020. Even so, only 28 percent reported deploying AI in production at scale across multiple functions with measurable impact.

The return on that spending remains uneven. A McKinsey survey of nearly 2,000 companies found that just 5.5 percent reported AI accounting for more than 5 percent of enterprise operating profit, and only about a quarter of initiatives delivered the return executives expected in the prior year. Separate industry figures put the average return at $3.70 per dollar spent on generative AI, with a median time to positive return of 14 months.

The numbers describe a market investing heavily and moving workloads into production faster than ever, while still working to translate that activity into clear financial impact. Companies anticipate large returns from agent-based AI, yet fewer than 40 percent currently attribute any operating profit impact to the technology, underscoring the distance between expectation and measured result.

Source: Value Add VC - https://valueaddvc.com/blog/enterprise-ai-spending-by-industry-whos-deploying-the-most-in-2026