The Widening AI Value Gap: A Growing Threat

A new study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) reveals a stark and widening divide in the corporate world’s artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, with only a tiny fraction of companies reaping substantial financial benefits from their investments while the vast majority struggle to generate meaningful returns.

According to BCG’s research, a mere 5% of companies are successfully harnessing AI to significantly improve their bottom line at scale. Conversely, a staggering 60% of organizations are failing to realize any tangible value from their AI initiatives, reporting only marginal gains despite considerable financial outlays.

“AI is fundamentally reshaping the business landscape at an accelerated pace compared to previous technological shifts,” notes BCG in its report, highlighting the urgency for businesses to adapt.

The top-performing organizations, dubbed “future-built” by BCG, are not merely seeing incremental improvements; they’re establishing a considerable AI value gap. These leading companies are already experiencing revenue growth that is 1.7 times higher and EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) margins that are 1.6 times greater than their less successful counterparts. This elite group has transcended isolated AI experiments, integrating AI into the core of their operations to drive shareholder value through enhanced revenue streams and measurable efficiency gains. Meanwhile, the remaining 35% of companies are attempting to scale their AI efforts but acknowledge that they need to accelerate their pace to remain competitive.

These “future-built” companies, having already reaped initial benefits, are reinvesting their gains, extending their lead. They plan to increase their IT spending by 26% and allocate 64% more of their IT budget to AI in 2025, resulting in an overall AI investment that is 120% higher than their slower-moving competitors. This aggressive investment strategy is anticipated to yield double the revenue increases and a 1.4 times greater reduction in costs from their AI deployments. For laggards, who often lack fundamental AI capabilities and fail to generate significant value, this dynamic creates a “vicious cycle of losing ground,” according to BCG.

One of the primary reasons for this disparity lies in a leadership vacuum within less successful firms. In these organizations, senior management frequently delegates AI strategy to lower-level employees, fails to establish a clear vision for the value of AI investments, and spreads resources thinly across disparate initiatives, resulting in a lack of focus and impact. This contrasts sharply with the leading companies, where executive leadership actively champions AI initiatives and aligns them with overall business objectives.

The key to success lies in a well-defined strategy adhered to by the top 5% of companies. These firms treat AI as a multiyear program, sponsored by the board and CEO, with clearly defined and ambitious goals. A critical element is ensuring shared ownership between business and IT departments, a practice these companies are 1.5 times more likely to implement than their peers. This collaboration is crucial to ensuring that AI deployments align with real business needs and deliver tangible results.

Instead of simply automating existing processes, leading companies focus on reshaping and reinventing core business functions, where the majority of value can be found. The report says that 70% of AI’s potential value is concentrated in key areas such as R&D, sales, marketing, and manufacturing. “Future-built” companies prioritize this reinvention, resulting in 62% of their AI projects already being deployed, compared to just 12% for the laggards. This focus on core functions allows for a more transformative impact on the business.

The rise of and investment in agentic AI – AI that combines predictive and generative capabilities, which allows it to learn, reason and act autonomously with minimal human input — is accelerating the AI value gap. These AI agents can essentially be viewed as digital workers, capable of handling complex workflows from supply chain management to customer service. The integration of agentic AI represents a significant step towards greater automation and efficiency.

Although it garnered little attention in 2024, agentic AI is already projected to account for 17% of total AI value in 2025, and this is expected to almost double to 29% by 2028. While almost none of the laggards are using them, one third of the leading firms are already using AI agents. These leaders are prioritising customer experience use cases for agents, with customer service being the top focus for 50% of companies.

Successful firms are investing in aggressively upskilling their workforce to be able to collaborate with AI, rather than focusing on job losses. They plan to upskill more than 50% of their internal staff, and make investments in broad-based employee AI enablement and dedicate time to structured learning. They are six times more likely to do this than lagging companies, and they involve employees twice as often in the process of co-designing and reshaping workflows to incorporate AI, ensuring smoother adoption and building trust. This proactive approach to talent development is essential for maximizing the benefits of AI implementation and fostering a culture of innovation.

Leading organizations avoid the “GenAI burden” of siloed, unscalable proofs-of-concept by building on a central, integrated AI platform. They are three times more likely to operate such a platform, allowing them to build common capabilities for security and monitoring just once and then reuse them, accelerating deployment and ensuring enterprise-wide scale. These firms are streamlining processes and data management through the building of a central, integrated AI platform. More than half of these firms operate on a single, enterprise-wide data model, compared to just four percent of their stagnating peers, giving teams quick access to reliable and governed data.

The message to the 95% of companies falling behind is clear: success requires a fundamental shift in mindset and approach. BCG recommends following a “10-20-70 rule,” where 70% of transformation efforts focus on people and processes, 20% on technology, and only 10% on the algorithms themselves. This emphasis on organizational and human factors underscores the importance of aligning AI initiatives with business strategy and fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.

The biggest obstacles to realizing value from AI investments are not technical in nature but rather organizational, relating to strategy, people and processes. As the technology continues to advance and the leaders accelerate their adoption, the window of opportunity for catching up is rapidly closing. Companies that fail to take decisive action now risk being permanently left behind in the increasingly competitive landscape of AI-driven business.