Companies are finally seeing AI ROI — and now they know how much more value it can deliver
Presented by SAP Enterprise AI has moved from experiment to execution, and that shift is beginning to show real returns. The SAP Value of AI Report 2026, produced with Oxford Economics and based on a survey of 2,600 business leaders across 13 countries, found that AI now supports nearly one-third of all tasks in the average organization, rising to 30% from 25% last year. ROI expectations for agentic AI have jumped from 10% last year to 17% this year, but many organizations believe AI could be delivering far more value. The report reveals that the gap comes down to strategy, data, and governance, rather than access to the newest model, says Sean Kask, chief AI strategy officer at SAP. "AI has moved from experiment to execution, and that's beginning to show real returns, but there's still a long way to go," Kask says. "That's because AI that lacks context, whether that's processes, data, or governance, at best creates activity without outcomes and at worst creates risk." Companies are still taking a piecemeal approach to AI Even as investment accelerates, more than half of organizations still invest in AI in an ad hoc or piecemeal way, and only 17% report a strategic, holistic approach to prioritization, though that figure has nearly doubled from 9% a year ago. That fragmentation may go back to board-level demands that employees start adopting AI without a strategy or adequate AI literacy behind it, which could produce scattered skunkworks efforts. In other companies, a lack of attention at board level can leave employees bringing their own tools to work and just experimenting. "You end up with a lot of organic, disjointed AI initiatives that pop up, and they struggled sometimes just because of data quality," Kask said. "But even the initiatives taking a strategic approach are still working in silos, where they may have consistent data that works in that one use case, but they're still not at the level where they're transforming an entire business process." That may help explain one of the report’s more counterintuitive findings: 69% of businesses say they are satisfied with their AI ROI, because they've proven AI can generate returns. Yet 67% remain unconvinced the technology is delivering its full potential, because that learning experience has made them aware of both how much more value AI can deliver and the challenges they need to overcome to scale it. Agents are changing the economics of enterprise AI SAP shipped more than 400 AI use cases across its portfolio so far, with many more in the works. Agents represent the next expansion, because they can plan and reason through multiple steps and tools to reach an objective, which mirrors how people and processes work, Kask says. "You're giving a task or an objective to an AI system, and it's able to iteratively work through several steps and access various tools to achieve that outcome," Kask said. "For instance, we've released, in beta, an agent for accruals accounting, a job that would typically take an accountant around 12 hours a month for a mid-size-company, and it gets reduced to two or three hours. So now scale that out across all these processes and its huge potential." In fact, general AI ROI went from 16% to 21% this year, and should grow to $15.9m in two years’ time, even as only 3% say they are fully prepared for it. Data quality remains the biggest barrier to AI value Getting ready for agents comes down to two fundamental requirements: connecting agents to contextually rich data, and governing them at scale. Data quality and availability are now the number-one reason organizations say they're not getting more value from AI, according to 73% of respondents, with 79% reporting rework, delays, or backlogs from low-quality outputs at least occasionally. The nature of the problem has changed compared to classic deep learning. Foundation models eliminate much of the need to find data, extract it, clean it, and train bespoke models, but they make preserving business context far more important. "As soon as you extract data from an ERP system, you break all the contextual information, all of the semantics, and for generative AI, that's the most useful part," Kask said. SAP is able to preserve that context at scale through a knowledge graph in its cloud ERP that maps 452,000 ABAP tables and 7.3 million data fields. In SAP Business Data Cloud, data products present information such as invoices and suppliers consistently across SAP and non-SAP systems without losing their business meaning. AI governance is the biggest challenge companies don't know they have As AI becomes more deeply embedded in business processes, governance is emerging as the next enterprise challenge. Only 12% of businesses say they are fully prepared to govern AI, while 69% acknowledge occasional to frequent use of unapproved shadow AI tools. “As companies roll out their AI initiatives, they often discover shadow agents – agents that can access data they shouldn’t or take actions they shouldn’t. The question then becomes: How do we audit these things?” Kask said. SAP’s AI Agent Hub responds by discovering and creating an inventory of agents, LLMs, and MCP servers, and customers have already surfaced thousands of SAP and non-SAP agents inside their landscapes that they did not know they had. It then layers on lifecycle management, identity and access control, and performance monitoring. Kask compares the discipline to hiring, since most companies would never onboard an employee without knowing which access rights and permissions that person needs to have in their role. Governance, however, extends beyond technology. Workforce transformation runs alongside the data work, with almost 80% of respondents agreeing that maximizing AI value requires more than technical upskilling and 75% already planning to reskill employees. The conversation is shifting away from which jobs AI will replace and toward how people and AI collaborate most effectively, since agents still require human oversight, redesigned workflows, and stronger judgment. All of this points toward what SAP calls the Autonomous Enterprise, which connects agents to contextually rich data and enterprise governance across functional silos while using Joule as the natural-language, generative interface between people and systems. “Realizing real value from AI is not going to be easy because it demands a new approach,” Kask concluded. “It is ultimately a human change more than a technical one, because you can only achieve real value if agents, processes, and people work as one.” Get the full findings. Download the SAP Value of AI Report 2026 . Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com .
