Gartner expects spending on AI agents and assistants to more than double to $65.5bn next year, while many firms cannot measure the return. Splunk executives who described that gap were selling a tool to close it, and the tool leaves buyers to define what an agent's work is worth.
Publishers:itwire.com
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives80
- Confidence45
Ascerta raised an $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital for software that ties enterprise AI spending to revenue and savings. So far, the evidence that buyers want it is two named customers and performance figures Ascerta reports about itself.
Reality
- Evidence30
- Adoption20
- Hype gap+40
- Incentives70
- Confidence40
Ramp puts median AI spend at the heaviest adopters at $7,400 per employee in July, up from $2,590 in January. A 1,500-organisation OpenAI study found token output has no meaningful link to revenue per employee.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption62
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives70
- Confidence55
At theCUBE Research's AI ROI in Contact Center Summit, executives from Cisco, Zoom and Talkdesk argued that a contained call can be a customer who has given up, and offered open-to-close time as the replacement.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption25
- Hype gap+32
- Incentives85
- Confidence50
Writing for Forbes, John Case argues that AI's proof problem is a measurement problem, citing MIT research in which 95% of studied organizations saw no P&L impact six months after a pilot. His company sells the systems that would hold the baseline.
Reality
- Evidence33
- Adoption18
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives82
- Confidence52
Daniel Jabaraj's Forbes column pairs Gartner's abandonment forecast with MIT's zero-return finding to argue that AI programs fail on business framing. One study counts projects and the other counts companies.
Reality
- Evidence30
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives75
- Confidence55
At theCUBE's contact center summit, analysts Bob Laliberte and Zeus Kerravala argued that agentic support should be scored on whether the customer's problem got completed. Their scorecard asks for five kinds of numbers, including cost and growth.
Reality
- Evidence34
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+32
- Incentives68
- Confidence52
Amit Mathradas, who took over Five9 in February, says the misconception is that humans are going away from the contact center. The customer result he offers is a containment rate above 50%.
Reality
- Evidence20
- Adoption24
- Hype gap+34
- Incentives82
- Confidence44
Anthropic's own engineers report large gains from Claude Code while the delivery dashboard sits still. The dev.to post that collected the numbers argues that both of the dashboards most teams watch measure only cost.
Reality
- Evidence32
- Adoption30
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives55
- Confidence38
American Banker's risk survey has 81 per cent of respondents placing AI model risk somewhere between moderate and critical, which tells a bank the downside belongs in its ROI case without telling it what number to write.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives55
- Confidence58
The gap between Rockwell's 95% of manufacturers funding AI and McKinsey's 2% embedding it in plant operations gets easier to read once you notice the 60% who never set a target for what the deployment should achieve.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption32
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives76
- Confidence52
Stanford puts AI use at 88% of organizations while agent deployment stays in single digits. The surveys on earnings impact point to one distinction, whether anyone redesigned the work the tools sit in.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption30
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives70
- Confidence45
Nearly nine in ten Fortune 1,000 executives say AI makes their organisations faster, but only six percent can point to clear ROI. Median quarterly spend has meanwhile risen about thirty-fold.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption68
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives75
- Confidence40
A Cutlefish post argues the token meter is precise about the spend and silent about the return, which is how hours and capacity mispriced product work long before AI arrived. The open question is who signs the R.
Publishers:cutlefish.substack.com
Reality
- Evidence30
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives42
- Confidence44
A $2.5M time-recovery figure and a 30% self-resolution rate rest entirely on per-event telemetry captured in the first sprint. Elastic's own survey says 8% of teams have that.
Publishers:elastic.co
Reality
- Evidence30
- Adoption22
- Hype gap+36
- Incentives85
- Confidence42
The 2026 Agentic Enterprise Index is the first usable public benchmark for agent deployment velocity, drawn from 400 businesses on Agentforce. Its ROI section is the thinnest part of it.
Reality
- Evidence34
- Adoption61
- Hype gap+38
- Incentives86
- Confidence44