An increasing number of companies are finding the much-promised financial gains of implementing artificial intelligence in the workplace have been slow to materialize. But that isn’t stopping many CEOs from spending even more on AI in the coming year.

A new study from advisory firm Teneo finds that 68% of CEOs will increase their AI spending next year. A growing number, however, are aware that they need to start showing returns on that investment—and an important part of their job is convincing shareholders to remain patient.

“As efforts shift from hype to execution, businesses are under pressure to show ROI from rising AI spend,” the company wrote. “Large-cap CEOs are seeing solid returns on current programs, particularly across administration, internal efficiency, and customer-facing applications. However, 84% of these CEOs predict that positive returns from new AI initiatives will take longer than six months to achieve. In contrast, investors are pushing for faster impact: 53% expect positive ROI in six months or less.”

To date, less than half of the AI projects have generated returns that exceed the cost of the programs, according to 350-plus public-company CEOs surveyed by Teneo.

Teneo’s survey comes on the heels of a Gallup study of AI use in the workplace, which showed a big spike in 2025. The percentage of U.S. workers who used AI on at least an occasional basis jumped from 40% to 45% between the second and third quarters of 2025. (In the second quarter of 2024, that number was just 27%.)

Power users of AI were on the rise in that study as well, with 10% of the respondents saying they used the technology daily in the third quarter, up from 8% at the end of the second quarter. A year ago, that number stood at just 4%.

Workers said they’re using AI to consolidate information or data and to generate ideas, with a slightly lower number using it to learn new things or automate basic tasks. A small percentage—just 9%—said they use AI to make predictions.

Teneo’s survey finds that the most successful AI strategies have been in the marketing and customer service spaces. More complex applications, such as security, legal, and human resources, have not yet lived up to the technology’s potential.

That’s not surprising, says Ryan Cox, global head of artificial intelligence at Teneo. More complex uses will need to be rolled out at a slower pace.

“The first wave of AI returns came from easy efficiency wins. The next wave is about rewiring core processes that inevitably have a longer, bumpier ROI curve,” Cox says. “These use cases are higher risk and have greater potential impact. You don’t rush them to market; you treat them as strategic change programs with board-level oversight, not experiments.”

Despite events like the November layoffs at Verizon, where 13,000 workers lost their jobs as part of a strategic shift towards AI, CEOs feel fears that increased AI usage will result in job losses are overblown. Some 67% told Teneo they expected the technology to increase their entry-level head count—and 58% said they expected it would result in more senior leaders coming on board.

As a result of this bullishness on AI, some 87% of the CEOs Teneo spoke with said they believed their organizations are prepared for future technological disruption. However, they cautioned, future leaders will struggle to keep pace with tech advancements, meaning agility and creativity will become the most important skills for future CEOs.

That enthusiastic attitude extended beyond the world of AI, also. Optimism about the economy was remarkably strong, given the uncertainty of this year, with 73% of CEOs and 82% of the 400 institutional investors surveyed saying they expected the global economy to improve over the first six months of 2026. (Mid-cap CEOs were much more bullish on the market than large-cap ones.)