Three quarters of board members expect AI to deliver value in the form of productivity and cost savings, but 97 percent of organisations are unable to achieve desired cost savings through productivity alone, Gartner said in research presented at its HR Symposium in Orlando on October 26. Only 3 percent of organisations have exceeded their cost saving goals through AI driven productivity.
Spending is rising anyway. Gartner said 38 percent of companies are already over budget on AI and 85 percent report planning to spend even more next year. Senior Director Analyst CV Viverito said organisations will not generate cost savings from AI at this point, and that the greater opportunity is to use AI to do things that were not possible before, shifting employee time into new capabilities, outcomes and sources of growth.
The alignment problem is as large as the savings problem. A July 2026 Gartner survey of 297 chief human resources officers found 78 percent of leaders have no agreement on where AI creates value, which Gartner said stalls transformation and clouds workforce decisions. Only about one in five employees has time freed by AI redirected toward more innovative work, the symposium heard.
The findings land in the middle of the largest enterprise AI spending cycle on record, and they are the demand side counterpart to the supply side numbers in this week’s earnings: hyperscalers are spending ahead of cash flow while their customers, by this measure, are mostly not banking savings. That does not settle whether the spending pays off, but it does say the payoff, if it comes, will arrive as new capacity rather than lower cost.