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Two and half years after the release of ChatGPT, the pace of AI development hasn’t let up much. A constant stream of new enterprise AI tools promises to remake work as we know it across every industry. But how much is generative AI actually moving the needle for companies that use it?
A handful of new reports aims to quantify how much businesses are adopting AI—as well as what they’re getting out of the technology.
As agents are billed as the next big chapter in generative AI, these surveys show many companies are rushing to test them out. But the data on how much all this AI spending has yielded in terms of results is mixed.
Agent uptick: A PwC survey of more than 300 executives in April found that 52% have either broadly or fully adopted AI agents; 27% reported limited usage. The rest of the companies either hadn’t yet adopted agents or had no plans to do so.
The top use cases were customer service, sales and marketing, and IT and cybersecurity. Most companies surveyed said their budgets were increasing because of agentic AI.
But the report authors wrote that while agents provide “a meaningful boost in productivity, [the technology] stops short of transformation.”
Chatbot challenges: Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research studied the effects of chatbots on work in Denmark in late 2023 and 2024, and found their impact somewhat underwhelming. They found that despite substantial investments from the companies they studied, the technology yielded less than 3% in productivity gains for workers, on average. While the study noted that randomized control trials showed more than 15% in time savings in some professions, those impacts were negated by other jobs and don’t translate fully into the real world.
“Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes,” the authors wrote. “Our findings challenge narratives of imminent labor market transformations due to generative AI. While adoption has been rapid, with firms now heavily invested in unlocking the technological potential, the economic impacts remain small.”
Growing pains: An IBM survey of CEOs in May found that only a quarter of their AI projects “have delivered expected ROI over the last few years, and only 16% have scaled enterprise-wide.” A little over half said they were seeing business impacts beyond cost savings.
“CEOs are balancing the pressures of short-term ROI and investing in long-term innovation when it comes to adopting AI,” Mohamad Ali, SVP and head of IBM Consulting, said in the report.
Mind the gap: Despite some of these mixed results, Box’s 2025 state of AI enterprise report pointed to a growing divergence between companies that have adopted AI and those that haven’t in terms of productivity gains.
Box found that 47% of more than 1,300 IT leaders described themselves as in the “early stage” of AI maturity, and 39% as in the “developing” phase. Those that are further along are seeing much bigger productivity gains, according to Box, with “leading edge” businesses clocking 37% ROI, on average. The most common measures of AI success were time savings, employee productivity metrics, and cost reduction, according to the survey.
“AI-first organizations—with clear business objectives, thoughtful implementation, and robust governance—are gaining significant advantages that appear likely to compound over time,” the authors wrote.