AI is key to growth, but CEOs struggle to demonstrate financial returns

Forty-four percent of CEOs struggle to demonstrate AI-driven financial returns to stakeholders, according to Gartner.

Yet CEOs are not retreating from technology investment. Instead, they are looking to AI and technology to help redesign how their organizations operate, compete and grow.

The 2027 Gartner CEO Survey, conducted in April and May 2026 among 203 global CEOs and senior business executives, found that 62% cited revenue/business growth as a top strategic business priority, while 75% plan to increase technology investment.

“The AI value problem will not be solved by simply adding more AI to existing ways of working,” says David Furlonger, distinguished vice-president analyst at Gartner. “CEOs increasingly need technology to create strategic freedom: the ability to enter markets, reshape offerings, reconfigure operations and respond to disruption faster than competitors.

“For CIOs, that means shifting the conversation from deploying AI to redesigning how the enterprise creates value.”

Technology has become the strategy

Technology is increasingly determining which strategic choices are available to enterprises. Eighty percent of CEOs said technology has become strategy, putting technology decisions at the center of conversations about growth, competitiveness and enterprise direction.

At the same time, CEOs are navigating significant disruption. Ninety-three percent said they expect economic volatility to have a high or medium impact on strategic business objectives through 2027, 79% expect that level of impact from persistent conflict, and 77% from AI industrialisation. High readiness for these disruptions is considerably lower at 24%, 11% and 20%, respectively.

“The objective is not technology for technology’s sake; it is strategic freedom,” says Furlonger. “Technology creates options for the enterprise: to change direction, pursue new sources of growth and respond when market conditions shift. CIOs who remain downstream implementers risk being excluded from the decisions that increasingly define competitive advantage.”

Redesign the business to generate AI returns

CEOs are also signaling that greater AI returns will require more than individual productivity improvements.

Sixty-three percent identified radically redesigning the operating model as a top power move to accelerate tangible financial returns from AI through 2027. Fifty-two percent cited aggressively deploying AI agents as employees, while 47% cited unlocking or reallocating capital through significant business restructuring.

“The lesson from earlier technology transformations is that value accelerates when organizations redesign around the new capability rather than simply bolt it onto existing processes,” says Furlonger. “AI needs to be built into how workflows, how decisions get made and how the enterprise competes.”

To help CEOs meet their strategic growth needs, CIOs should:

• Redesign workflows around intelligence: Prioritise AI investments that change how workflows, decisions are made and value is delivered, rather than simply accelerating existing tasks.
• Build for strategic freedom: Create modular architectures and reduce rigid dependencies so the organisation can pivot, switch providers and scale new capabilities as conditions change.
• Measure outcomes, not AI activity: Establish clear financial and operational measures including unit economics, decision velocity, speed to market, customer outcomes and business impact, while governing AI, digital labor and workforce redesign as an integrated transformation.

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