alt Hacker News56% of CEOs report zero financial return from AI in 2026 (PwC survey, n=4,454)
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ChrisArchitect • today at 6:14 AM
atela • today at 1:51 AM
The question is whether legacy players can drive strategic growth that changes their trajectory to meet the AI-native disrupters. This is a data point.
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orionblastar • today at 1:08 AM
The average person is not ready for AI yet. Microsoft's Copilot has a low adoption rate. Data Centers have big energy bills and a lack of clients, and have no ROI for most of them.
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hulitu • today at 7:10 AM
> 56% of CEOs report zero financial return from AI in 2026 (PwC survey, n=4,454)
This is a lie. It can't be zero. It is negative.
I've been building implementation guides for solo founders and small businesses trying to use AI practically, so I read the PwC CEO Survey closely when it dropped.
The headline number (12% of CEOs generating measurable returns) gets cited a lot, but I think the more revealing finding is the 56% with zero financial impact.
These are companies with enterprise AI budgets, dedicated teams, and access to every tool on the market and the majority are getting nothing back.
PwC calls it "Pilot Purgatory." The pattern: AI gets deployed in isolated, tactical projects that don't connect to revenue. internal tooling, content drafts, meeting summaries while the 12% they call the "Vanguard" are using AI in the product and customer experience itself (44% of Vanguard vs 17% of everyone else).
What I found interesting from a solo founder angle: the structural barriers causing large companies to fail at this “bureaucracy, legacy systems, misaligned incentives, multi-department approval processes” don't exist at the one-person scale.
The bottleneck for small operators is different: it's not knowing which workflows are worth building, in what order, and what "system-level" vs "task-level" use actually means in practice.
Curious if others have a take on why the enterprise failure rate is this high despite the investment, and whether the Vanguard pattern (AI into the product, not just the back office) matches what people are seeing in practice.