Enterprise AI: Spend Outruns Value

• Roughly 2.53 trillion dollars is expected to be spent on AI in 2026, yet 95 percent of enterprise generative AI pilots still show no measurable P&L impact
• The share of companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives rose from 17 percent to 42 percent in a single year, even as 88 percent of organizations now use AI somewhere
• Fewer than 4 in 10 companies using AI can point to any EBIT impact, and for most of them the effect sits below 5 percent
• Board oversight lags deployment: only about 8 percent of major companies disclose real board level AI oversight, while the Chief AI Officer role went from 26 percent to 76 percent adoption in a single year
• Bought AI tools land value roughly twice as often as homegrown builds, and close to half of all proofs of concept die before reaching production
• Enterprise software vendors are increasingly charging "tollgating" fees for access to a company's own data as it scales AI initiatives, adding a new and unplanned cost line
• Accountability, not additional investment, is being framed as the next competitive differentiator, with new research tying clear ownership and governance directly to measurable AI outcomes

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AI, Leadership and the Human Factor

• One major firm is targeting a 20 percent increase in consultant headcount, mostly at entry level, betting that AI will let its people take on bigger problems rather than replace them
• Four unresolved cultural tensions, agency, the erosion of the traditional apprenticeship model, a widening leadership to workforce perception gap, and accumulating "culture debt," are named as the real barrier to AI adoption
• 42 percent of workers say their employer is not evaluating AI's impact on people, with a recommended fix being to state plainly whether a role is becoming AI-assisted, augmented, or powered rather than leaving it implicit
• Shared presence and culture are being reframed as a durable competitive advantage precisely because AI can process information but cannot replicate the shared rituals that bind teams together
• Verified, tested capability is replacing certificates as the real benchmark for AI skill, since a single trained "champion" on an otherwise untrained team reverts to the team average within a quarter
• A 2026 AI jobs barometer points to a reshaping of work rather than mass job losses, with the clearest gains coming from using AI to drive growth rather than efficiency alone

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Agentic AI Moves Into the Commercial Core

• Agentic AI deployments in customer facing functions are scaling 3.5 times faster than deployments elsewhere, with 41 percent of those projects already fully scaled
• In B2B sales, 71 percent of top performing growth teams have raised AI budgets by double digits, yet fewer than 10 percent of companies overall have scaled the technology, since the gains depend on redesigning commercial workflows rather than layering AI onto existing ones
• New research on agentic AI accountability finds legal teams most concerned about unclear ownership of AI decisions, regulatory exposure that moves faster than compliance frameworks, and eroding trust with customers and regulators
• SAP customers are being told to follow a fixed sequence: cloud ERP and a clean core first, then trusted data and integrated processes, then governance, with AI at scale coming last
• Enterprise AI architecture decisions are increasingly framed around four questions: what the AI should actually own, how much autonomy it should have, what counts as the source of truth, and how the system behaves after launch

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Geopolitics, Trade and Supply Chain Exposure

• The EU adopted its 21st sanctions package against Russia, its largest in four years, with 218 new listings, asset freezes on 94 banks, and the first mechanism to fully ban crypto asset services from third countries used to evade sanctions
• US trade policy is entering an active phase as a 150 day tariff stopgap expires, with a wave of Section 301 and Section 232 actions on forced labor, overcapacity, chips, electronics, and pharmaceuticals expected in quick succession
• US Customs has processed 229,609 CAPE declarations for IEEPA tariff refunds, with 86.3 billion dollars in refunds and interest already sent to the Treasury out of roughly 121.75 billion dollars accepted for processing
• Chokepoints from the Strait of Hormuz to undersea data cables and semiconductor supply are described as instruments of geopolitical leverage, pushing companies to map their specific exposure rather than assume disruption lands evenly
• Critical minerals are flagged as a strategic blind spot because their low cost hides their ability to halt production entirely, from fighter aircraft to semiconductors to automotive assembly lines
• The UK-India Free Trade Agreement has entered into force, cutting tariffs and opening access to India's government procurement market, while Poland is positioned as a growing transatlantic investment platform with close to 30 billion dollars in American investment already in place
• Chinese automakers are exporting close to 10 million vehicles while holding roughly a 35 percent cost advantage over EU built battery electric vehicles, even as their domestic market contracts by 10 percent this year

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Energy, Industrials and Dealmaking

• Electricity systems are shifting from a generation race to a systems challenge, with value moving toward grid flexibility, dispatchable low carbon capacity, and orchestration rather than simply adding renewable megawatts
• Industrial AI is already widening the gap between leaders and laggards, with cited cases of AI agents cutting logistics delays by 80 percent and digital twins reducing automotive testing costs by 50 percent
• Manufacturers entered the year with flat revenue and mixed margins, with US demand holding steady, Germany strengthening on exports, and China posting uneven gains led by auto and advanced sectors
• Scale requirements in energy and AI infrastructure could push global M&A toward a 4 trillion dollar year
• European maritime consolidation is expected to center on hundreds of smaller, specialized companies in short sea shipping, subsea infrastructure, and offshore wind support rather than the largest listed container lines
• The global insurance market reached an estimated 8.3 trillion dollars in premiums in 2025, and AI is expected to shift the customer "front door" from agents toward AI assistants while opening categories such as cyber and climate risk

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The CEO and CFO Agenda

• A survey of 415 CEOs representing about 10 percent of global market capitalization finds that AI success now depends on execution rather than experimentation, and that M&A is becoming a capability building strategy rather than only a scale play
• CEOs who succeed over the long term are increasingly described as leading through discontinuity rather than complexity, as AI reshapes the economics of expertise and industries converge
• CFOs are being reframed from scorekeepers into strategic navigators, expected to understand shifting sources of competitive advantage and personally lead resource allocation through what one executive calls an "unfreezing moment."
• Based on 236 interviews with senior finance leaders, five "quiet gaps" are identified as the real barrier to CFO readiness, more tied to enterprise leadership than technical depth
• Organizations built around a single decision maker are being told that structure stops scaling once the company doubles in size, and needs to be redesigned for where the business is going rather than where it has been

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Consulting, Talent and Impact

• India added more than 300 Global Capability Centres in the past fiscal year, nearly three times the previous five year pace, with the sector now contributing close to 100 billion dollars to the economy and mandates shifting from cost savings toward AI, engineering, and enterprise strategy
• An estimated 98 percent of consulting firms are described as competing in a commercial "sameness zone," with only 2 to 3 percent judged to have a proposition distinctive enough to stand apart
• At least 75 percent of a company's carbon footprint sits in its supply chain, positioning chief procurement officers as de facto owners of corporate sustainability strategy
• Earth observation data already contributes an estimated 440 billion dollars to global GDP, with another 263 billion dollars in annual value still unrealized
• Citizen satisfaction with government digital services rises when governments adopt AI faster rather than more cautiously, with weekly AI usage across 44 surveyed countries climbing to 64 percent, up 26 percentage points in two years

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Thanks to Romal Shetty, Bob Sternfels, Rumki Majumdar, Marc Beierschoder, Tiger Tyagarajan, Tobias Blaser, Neha Kabra, Sarovar Agarwal, Karin Mair, Ivan Ostojic, Dr. Veit Buetterlin-Goldberg, Soumendra Mohanty, Sarah Adam, Per Kristian Hong, Natalie G., Pedro Oliveira, Ema K., John O'Brien, Dr. Isabel Huber, Ann Clark, Vidhya Ganesan, Karl Whelpdale, Alia Al-Masaeid, Morgan Montagne, Diane S., Kyle Forrest, Tomasz Marciniak, Luk Smeyers, Drew DeLong, Michael Kruse, Niya Baxter, Kelly Nelson, Andreas Pyrcek, Paul Laudicina, Andrew Bergbaum‍ and Teresa Owusu-Adjei for contributing insights to this edition. Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-linkedin-cw-30-31-strategy-consulting-thomas-allgeyer-bj2ge/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_detail_base%3BG1slFFflQD6ziDR4IVzMEQ%3D%3D