Dive Brief:
- Corporate investments in artificial intelligence have soared over the past year as AI agents have added new fuel to the market’s momentum, according to survey findings released Tuesday by Ernst & Young.
- About 21% of surveyed business leaders said their organizations were investing $10 million or more in AI, up from 16% just a year ago, while a third (35%) anticipated spending $10 million or more on the technology next year, according to the Big Four accounting firm.
- “Business executives are grappling with the tension between their awe of AI’s potential and the complexity of integrating it meaningfully into their organizations,” Dan Diasio, EY’s global consulting AI leader, said in a press release. “What’s next for leaders is to harness the combined strengths of AI and human ingenuity and channel cost savings into groundbreaking innovations.”
Dive Insight:
AI agents — which are designed to perform workplace tasks with little human intervention — could generate up to $450 billion in economic value through revenue uplift and cost savings by 2028 across 14 countries including the U.S, U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Japan, according to a report released earlier this month by tech consulting firm Capgemini.
Gartner predicts at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028.
About 34% of senior business leaders say their organization has already started to implement agentic AI technology, according to EY. Common use cases include managing processes, enhancing customer support, improving IT efficiency and beefing up cybersecurity.
The EY research found that nearly three-quarters (73%) of senior leaders believe that entire business units will one day be managed by agentic AI. Still, 87% of respondents said there are barriers to agentic AI adoption in their organization, including data privacy concerns and a lack of regulations governing how the technology should be used.
EY polled 500 U.S. business leaders across a wide range of industries.
