Enterprises are moving beyond AI experimentation as executives demand clearer evidence of financial and operational returns.
Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is increasingly delivering business value, but only about a quarter of enterprises are converting their investments into significant financial returns.
This is one of the key findings of new research from Google Cloud, in partnership with National Research Group, which surveyed 2 403 executives globally, across industries, geographies, company sizes and AI-adoption stages.
The study contains Africa-specific data from a separate PwC report, which analysed 1 217 large companies globally, including 85 in Africa.
The report, titled: “From token-maxxing to ROI”, found that 26% of enterprises qualify as AI return on investment leaders, with financial returns from AI initiatives increasing year-on-year. A further 58% of organisations reported steadily increasing returns.
However, the findings point to a growing divide between organisations experimenting with AI and those that are successfully embedding the technology into their operations and generating measurable business outcomes.
Kim Schulze, head of digital advisory practice at Accelera Digital Group, says executives are seeing value from AI as they scale revenue or output without proportionally increasing operating costs.
“More than half of respondents say AI has already caused a significant or transformational change to their organisation’s operating model, which shows that ROI has become top of mind for the C-Suite.
“We are seeing a desire to demystify AI and make it practical. AI is moving from a technology experiment to being used to remove friction, transform existing processes and create measurable business impact.”
Schulze adds that enterprise AI rapidly went from pilot to production to delivering value, and organisations are measuring AI’s value against its costs.
Despite the challenges of translating AI deployments into financial returns, investment in the technology continues to rise.
The research found that 97% of respondents plan to increase their AI spending in the next fiscal year.
Expected returns are being driven primarily by AI-powered analytics and decision intelligence, workflow automation, customer-facing experiences, and data and infrastructure modernisation.
“While some were discussing AI trends, the AI ROI leaders were hard at work getting more value from AI. The most useful role for AI is often not to replace people or make the final decision. Instead, they use it to augment people, speed up decisions, grow revenue from new products or services, increase productivity and accelerate innovation,” says Schulze.
“The practical lesson is to keep the challenge narrow and simple: identify the friction point, define the business outcome, prioritise rigorously based on value potential and then implement the simplest solution that can deliver impact. Complexity is not a measure of value.”
Africa struggles to scale
The Google Cloud findings broadly align with research from PwC, which found that AI-driven financial returns are concentrated among a relatively small group of companies.
PwC’s AI performance report found that the top 20% capture 74% of AI-driven financial returns.
According to PwC, these companies focus AI investments on growth and business reinvention, build fit-for-purpose foundations and embed AI across their organisations.
Africa, however, trails the global AI leaders across major measures of AI-driven performance. PwC says this suggests the region’s challenge is increasingly about execution and scaling, rather than simply adopting AI.
“PwC found that 82% of organisations in Africa have participated in AI pilots, but fewer are scaling deployments across the enterprise or using AI to create new sources of value.
“Among African CEOs that have invested in AI, 23% reported revenue increases, while 25% reported cost reductions over the past year. The opportunity for the region is not to do more AI. It is to scale the right AI, deliberately and decisively.”
The growing focus on returns is also reflected in online search behaviour. Google’s research found that YouTube searches for “AI ROI” overtook searches for “how to use AI” in April. This followed a 1 400% increase in Google searches for “AI ROI” during the 12 months to August 2025.
Search interest in other AI-related concepts has also increased as businesses have moved from understanding the technology to looking at how it can be applied.
Searches for “GenAI” increased 800% in the year to January 2024, while searches for “how to use AI” rose 160% in December 2022. By June 2026, searches for “token efficiency” had increased 335% during the first half of the year.
“As a result, the natural progression of AI in business will be determined by a keen understanding of how and where AI is driving ROI,” says Schulze.
“Over time, the real advantage comes from creating a culture where teams continuously identify opportunities, test focused AI interventions, and measure whether they are improving business outcomes.”
It identified the AI ROI leaders as roughly a quarter of respondents, with the group distinguished by three factors: decision-making authority, AI capability development and the extent to which AI is embedded into the business.
The research also highlights decision-making speed as an increasingly important measure of AI’s business value.
Almost half (48%) of AI ROI leaders said ownership and decision-making authority for AI agent initiatives is “extremely clear”, compared with 27% of other organisations.
Meanwhile, 38% of AI ROI leaders have ongoing AI capability development embedded into roles with required training, compared with 18% of other organisations.
“Faster decision-making has surpassed increased productivity as the top-cited measurable outcome driven by AI investments,” adds Schulze.
“This is an important distinction: AI can accelerate analysis, surface options and reduce the time it takes to get to an answer, while people retain accountability for judgement and the final decision.”
