What companies are getting right about AI in 2026 but why there is still some way to go

AI is at the top of every CIO's agenda, yet most organisations still struggle to turn pilots into profit.

According to Deloitte's 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report, just 25 per cent of companies have moved more than 40 per cent of their AI experiments into production. Bain and Company adds a second, complementary angle: as organisations push beyond pilots, executives say roughly 80 per cent of gen AI use cases met or exceeded expectations. Meanwhile, only 23 per cent of respondents say they can tie generative AI initiatives to more revenue or lower costs. That's a crisp way to say "the models can work, but enterprise value capture is harder".

Those stats sound dire, but they do have a flip side, which I have experienced firsthand.

Some companies are capturing value, and those companies have something in common.

Broadly speaking, they're using the same AI available to everyone. What they're doing differently is focusing on details such as integration, governance, and perhaps most importantly, context.

That focus has implications for the types of projects that have been prioritised over the past year. In many ways, these initiatives offer a preview of the enterprise technology trends that continue to shape 2026.

The enterprise AI reality check

Before looking at the types of projects that thrive in 2026, it's worth taking a step back to understand what we're talking about when it comes to companies using AI at scale.

Almost every meaningful AI use case comes down to processes: a sequence of repeatable steps, decisions, and handoffs.

There is a big gap between how processes look on paper and how they run in real life, where extra steps and exceptions accumulate. Fragmented processes are one of the biggest reasons AI and automation fail to scale.

That isn't the only challenge. Gartner continues to rank poor data quality among the largest obstacles to AI adoption.

Simply put, AI depends on data quality, which remains a pervasive struggle at many organisations. And even when data is properly cleaned, many organisations run into another problem. It's locked in silos like ERP and CRM systems, emails, and IT service management platforms.

Why AI isn't scaling: The missing context layer

Taken together, messy, siloed data and fragmented processes show why scaling AI is so difficult. AI systems are being asked to act without understanding how the business actually works. Models see tables, tickets, and logs, but not the end-to-end process they belong to.

This is where process intelligence comes in.

Process intelligence is the discipline of continuously capturing, connecting, and analysing operational data from every relevant system to create a system-agnostic digital twin of how work really flows across the enterprise.

It's essential to AI at scale. Gartner has started calling this kind of work "context engineering". It refers to the practice of designing the data, workflows, and environment so AI systems can understand intent and make enterprise-aligned decisions, rather than relying on clever prompts. Without that context layer, even the best models will optimise the wrong step, automate a broken workflow, or reinforce hidden failure modes.

At enterprise scale, there is no AI without process intelligence. The organisations that are getting real value are the ones that first build an accurate, cross-system view of their processes, and only then let AI reason over, simulate, and improve those workflows.

Where AI delivers this year

Despite the challenges that enterprises have faced when deploying AI, there's clear cause for optimism.

The most promising AI use cases have shared three traits:

• Understand context: Operational context provides the necessary grounding. AI performs best when it can see the full picture both upstream and downstream of its actions. This level of visibility requires a cross-system Process Intelligence layer that connects fragmented data and exposes how work actually flows across the business.
• Be deployed strategically: AI delivers the highest ROI when deployed strategically - focusing on measurable business impact and tracking outcomes across the value chain. Yet too often, organisations get stuck in fragmented pilots driven by local priorities instead of strategy, failing to target the high-value opportunities that move the P&L.
• Work with everything else: AI must embed into existing workflows and operate alongside humans. While machines handle routine, rules-based tasks, humans remain essential for judgment, edge cases, and decisions requiring context and accountability. To scale, AI must operate as part of a cohesive system that connects people, systems, and other agents.

In other words, AI delivers where CIOs pair advanced models with an accurate cross-system view of how their business runs today, and a controlled way to change it.

The new CIO mandate

This shift is rewriting the CIO job description in real-time. As we look at the remainder of 2026, CIOs are no longer being judged solely on uptime or budget. They are being evaluated on their ability to cut through the hype and orchestrate complex, cross-functional transformations.

The organisations that invested in building a contextual foundation early this year are the ones seeing AI pay its way today.

For the rest, the hype is starting to feel like a liability.

Patrick Thompson is coming to Australia in July as the keynote speaker at two Process Intelligence (PI) Forums with the theme It's time to industrialise Enterprise AI. The Forums are part of the company's global series covering 24 cities across six continents. Seats are limited, so register today for the event in Sydney (July 21) and Melbourne (July 23).