Companies Are Spending Trillions on AI, but Executives Can't Say Who's in Charge
Key Takeaways
- •Only 34% of C-suite executives said it is consistently clear who makes AI decisions, compared with 53% of board members and 57% of senior managers below the C-suite, according to Pearl Meyer's Q2 2026 survey of 116 corporate leaders.
- •Gartner projects total worldwide AI spending, including infrastructure capital expenditures, will reach $2.5 trillion this year, a 44% year-over-year increase, and rise to $3.3 trillion next year.
- •In a separate May survey of 900 CEOs, 80% of U.S. CEOs believed their job was at risk if their AI projects failed, while 81% expected another CEO to be ousted because of an AI failure or crisis.
- •While 63% of CEOs said employees could handle additional organizational change without being stretched too thin, only 33% of C-suite executives and 40% of non-C-suite executives agreed.
- •According to Pearl Meyer principal Brad Jayne, confidence that AI will deliver significant gains within 18 months holds at roughly 50% among leaders at every stage of AI maturity, from companies that have not started to those in enterprise-wide deployment.
Everyone agrees that someone is calling the shots on corporate AI strategy. What many executives cannot say is who that someone is.
Only 34% of C-suite executives said it is consistently clear which executive or team makes calls about AI in a new Pearl Meyer survey — the lowest figure of any cohort polled. Among corporate board members, the figure rose to 53%. Among senior managers and professionals below the C-level, it climbed higher still, to 57%.
The pattern is striking: the executives most likely to be blocking and tackling on-the-ground AI implementation are the least convinced that anyone clearly owns the decisions and the results. Those furthest from the messiness of implementation are more likely to consider the matter settled. Meanwhile, 78% of executives below the C-suite reported that their companies have the senior talent required to effectively implement and oversee AI across the whole organization.
Significant gaps between the uppermost rungs of companies and other executives run through much of Pearl Meyer's Q2 2026 Market Intelligence Survey. The poll of 116 board members, CEOs, C-suite executives, and senior managers below them was conducted in May and June and shared exclusively with Fortune ahead of its release on Thursday.
The findings, which indicate that AI deployment is not going as smoothly as some CEOs had hoped, arrive at a high-stakes and expensive moment. Total AI spending, including capital expenditures on AI infrastructure, is poised to reach $2.5 trillion this year, a 44% increase over last year, according to research and advisory firm Gartner. Next year, spending is projected to rise to $3.3 trillion, the firm found.
That scale helps explain why questions of governance are becoming harder to ignore: when AI budgets move from pilots to enterprise-wide rollouts, companies need clear decision rights, not just enthusiasm for the technology. At that level of investment, CEOs know their heads could be on the chopping block if they fall behind competitors or fail to deliver at their own companies. A survey of 900 CEOs published in May found that 80% of U.S. CEOs think their job is at risk if their AI projects wither on the vine, while 81% believe a fellow CEO will be ousted due to an AI failure or crisis.
"Ambition for AI outcomes is currently outpacing the leadership structure needed to deliver on them," the Pearl Meyer study, published Thursday, states. "Additional investment without clear ownership will only widen that gap."
At this point, however, expectations about how much impact AI will have on individual companies do not appear rooted in how much implementation progress has actually been made. Brad Jayne, a principal at Pearl Meyer and co-author of the study, said confidence that AI will deliver significant gains within 18 months holds at about 50% among leaders at every stage of maturity — the pilot phase, experimentation, enterprise-level deployment, and companies that have not started anything yet.
"There's an impact-versus-speed tension," said Jayne. Handing out licenses for ChatGPT or Copilot is quick and easy, he noted. "Building big systems around that and pushing them through the organization and making sure it's not making errors, that takes a lot longer."
CEOs may also be overly optimistic about how close their employees are to burnout. Asked whether employees could take on additional organizational change — with AI implementation as an example — without feeling stretched too thin, 63% of CEOs responded affirmatively. Only 33% of the C-suite and 40% of non-C-suite executives agreed.
Boards, for their part, may be in the dark about how much more change is coming. Asked whether achieving strategic goals will require significant changes to how the organization operates within three years, 88% of CEOs and 79% of C-suite executives said yes. Only 42% of directors agreed.
Coupled with the change-fatigue response, Jayne said, "that's an alarm bell for me."
"The board is basically saying, 'We're good. We've made investments, we're structured right, go make changes,'" said Jayne. "And the management team is saying, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa. In order to be effective here and get our strategy done, we're going to have to make big changes in how we operate together.'"
Jayne's worry is about what happens when the spending has to be justified a year from now. If boards and management teams cannot connect AI spending to outcomes that investors can recognize and appreciate, there could be problems.
"I worry about finger pointing," said Jayne. The cause could be culture, learning agility, or insufficient experimentation with AI tools.
"It might come to some turnover," said Jayne. "I think we're in for a bumpy ride."
