Worldwide AI spending is projected to total $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47 percent increase over 2025. Enterprise AI spending specifically is estimated at $247 billion globally for the year, growing 64 percent year over year. Enterprise generative AI spending had already grown 222 percent from 2024 to 2025, reaching $37 billion.

Production deployment has expanded alongside the spending. Seventy-two percent of enterprises reported at least one AI workload in production as of the first quarter of 2026, up from 55 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2020. Seventy-two percent of organizations report using generative AI, compared with 33 percent in 2024.

Financial outcomes remain concentrated. While 88 percent of organizations regularly use AI in at least one business function, only 39 percent report any measurable EBIT impact, and 6 percent qualify as high performers where AI contributes more than 5 percent of enterprise EBIT. Nearly two-thirds of organizations have not begun scaling AI beyond initial deployments.

Return figures show a wide distribution. The median enterprise reports 2.4 times return on AI investment, while the top quartile reports 5.1 times or higher.

The gap between adoption breadth and earnings impact is the defining statistic in the current data. Deployment has become close to universal among large organizations, while the financial results remain concentrated in a small group.

Source: Stanford HAI - https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/economy