The Value Gap From AI Investments Is Widening Dangerously Fast

The promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has captivated boardrooms and fueled investment across industries. Yet, for many organizations, the anticipated revolution remains an elusive dream. Despite significant capital poured into AI initiatives, a stark divide is emerging, separating a small cohort of high-performing innovators from a vast majority grappling to extract any meaningful return. This isn’t just a minor discrepancy; it’s a rapidly expanding “value gap” that threatens to redefine market leadership for years to come.

The urgency of this situation is underscored by recent findings:

“Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has found a widening chasm separating an elite of AI masters from the majority of firms struggling to generate any value from their AI investments.

A study from BCG found that a mere five percent of companies are successfully achieving bottom-line value from AI at scale. In sharp contrast, 60 percent are failing to achieve any material value, reporting only minimal gains despite making substantial investments in the technology.

“AI is reshaping the business landscape far faster than previous technology waves,” said Nicolas de Bellefonds, a managing director and senior partner and global leader of BCG’s AI efforts, and a coauthor of the report.

“The companies that are capturing real value from AI aren’t just automating—they’re reshaping and reinventing how their businesses work. And they’re pulling away.”

Top-performing organisations, which BCG labels “future-built,” aren’t just succeeding; they are creating a formidable and widening AI value gap. They already generate 1.7 times more revenue growth and 1.6 times higher EBIT margins than the lagging majority. This elite group has moved beyond isolated experiments to fundamentally reinvent their operations, driving shareholder returns through revenue increases and measurable workflow improvements. The remaining 35 percent of companies are making efforts to scale up but admit they are not moving fast enough to keep pace.

Future-built companies, having reaped early rewards, are now reinvesting their gains to pull even further ahead. They plan to spend 26 percent more on IT and dedicate 64 percent more of their IT budget to AI in 2025. This results in an overall AI investment that is 120 percent higher than their slower competitors.

As a consequence, future-built companies expect to see double the revenue increases and 1.4 times greater cost reductions from their AI applications. For the laggards, who lack foundational capabilities and generate almost no value, this creates what BCG calls a “vicious cycle of losing ground.”

The Leadership Imperative: Beyond Automation to Reinvention

The root cause of this alarming disparity isn’t technical; it’s profoundly organizational. A critical factor identified by BCG is a pervasive failure of leadership among lagging firms. Too often, AI strategy is delegated downwards, a clear vision for value remains undefined, and resources are spread thinly across disconnected, low-impact initiatives. This fragmented approach prevents the cohesive, enterprise-wide transformation necessary for AI success.

In stark contrast, the elite “future-built” organizations approach AI as a board and CEO-sponsored, multiyear strategic program with clearly defined, ambitious targets. Nearly all C-level leaders in these trailblazing companies are deeply engaged with AI, compared to a mere eight percent in their lagging counterparts. This top-down commitment fosters a model of shared ownership between business and IT departments, a practice 1.5 times more common among leaders. This creates fertile ground for investment and focused execution.

As one senior retail executive told BCG, they “concentrate in particular on senior sponsorship and ownership of AI benefits by the businesses, which creates the room to invest.” This demonstrates a crucial understanding: AI isn’t just an IT project; it’s a business transformation initiative that requires executive buy-in and clear accountability from the very top.

These leaders aren’t merely automating existing processes; they’re fundamentally reshaping and inventing core business workflows where the majority of value lies. The report found that 70 percent of AI’s potential value is concentrated in core functions such as R&D, sales, marketing, and manufacturing. Future-built companies prioritize this reinvention, resulting in 62 percent of their AI initiatives already being deployed, compared to just 12 percent for the laggards. This focus on deep integration and measurable impact is key to their success.

Agentic AI: The Next Frontier Widening the Gulf

Further accelerating this value gap is the emergence and strategic investment in agentic AI. This advanced form of AI combines predictive and generative capabilities, allowing it to “reason, learn, and act autonomously” with minimal human input. These AI agents can function as digital workers, capable of handling complex workflows ranging from sophisticated supply chain optimization to personalized customer service interactions.

While hardly discussed in 2024, agentic AI already accounts for 17 percent of total AI value in 2025 and is projected to almost double to 29 percent by 2028. The top firms are moving quickly, with a third already using agents, compared to almost none of the laggards. These leaders are prioritising customer experience use cases for agents, with customer service being the top focus for 50 percent of companies.

“Agentic AI isn’t a future concept—it’s already reshaping workflows and redefining roles. Companies should view it as the next step in scaling AI, not as the starting point,” said Amanda Luther, a managing director and senior partner at BCG and a coauthor of the report.

“Agents represent a huge opportunity but aren’t simply plug-and-play: companies urgently need to redesign how work gets done, addressing the impact of agents on existing processes, roles, and skills.”

The ability of agentic AI to autonomously manage tasks provides an unprecedented leap in efficiency and capability. While leaders are already leveraging this power, the vast majority are not even at the starting line, ensuring that the gap in value extraction will only grow wider as these advanced systems mature and become more prevalent.

Talent, Platform, and the Path Forward

Beyond technology, talent is another key differentiator. Rather than fearing job displacement, future-built companies are aggressively upskilling their workforce to collaborate effectively with AI. They plan to upskill more than 50 percent of their internal staff, investing in broad-based employee AI enablement and dedicating time for structured learning. This proactive approach is six times more likely than in lagging companies. Furthermore, these leaders involve employees twice as often in co-designing and reshaping workflows to incorporate AI agents, ensuring smoother adoption and building trust across the organization.

Leading organizations also 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 once and reuse them, accelerating deployment and ensuring enterprise-wide scale. More than half of these firms operate on a single, enterprise-wide data model, compared to just four percent of their stagnating peers. This provides teams with quick access to reliable and governed data, a critical foundation for any impactful AI initiative.

Actionable Steps for Bridging the Divide

For the 95 percent of companies currently falling behind, the message is urgent and clear. The path to success is well-defined, but it demands a fundamental shift in mindset, strategy, and organizational structure. Here are three actionable steps your organization can take to bridge the AI value gap:

1. Elevate AI Strategy to the Boardroom:

Stop delegating AI strategy to middle management. AI must be a board and CEO-sponsored initiative with a clear, multiyear vision for value creation. Foster deep C-level engagement and establish shared ownership between business units and IT. Without this top-down commitment, efforts will remain fragmented and fail to scale.

2. Reinvent Core Workflows, Don’t Just Automate:

Move beyond simply optimizing existing tasks. Identify core business functions (R&D, sales, marketing, manufacturing) where AI can fundamentally reshape and reinvent processes. Prioritize initiatives with the highest potential for measurable impact on revenue growth and cost reduction, and focus on deployment over endless experimentation.

3. Invest in People, Platform, and Agentic AI Readiness:

Aggressively upskill your workforce to become AI-literate and collaborative, dedicating resources to broad-based enablement and co-designing new workflows. Build a central, integrated AI platform with a unified data model to ensure scalability and efficiency. While not a starting point, strategically assess and prepare for the integration of agentic AI to capitalize on its autonomous capabilities and avoid being left behind.

Conclusion

The biggest roadblocks to achieving substantial value from AI investments are not technical but organizational, primarily concerning people, strategy, and processes. As AI technology advances at an unprecedented pace and the leading firms continue to accelerate their investments and capabilities, the window of opportunity for catch-up is rapidly diminishing. BCG advises a “10-20-70 rule,” where transformation efforts should focus 70 percent on people and processes, 20 percent on technology, and only 10 percent on the algorithms themselves. Firms that fail to embrace this holistic approach and act decisively now risk being permanently relegated to the sidelines, facing a “vicious cycle of losing ground” in the new AI-driven economy.

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.