Companies in 2026 are expected to spend over $2.5 trillion on AI, a 47% increase on 2025. This is a spending spree never seen before in the history of organizational investments, and it’s driven in part by companies giving all employees access to GenAI tools such as Co-Pilot, Gemini, or Claude.
Wondering what drove this surge, over the last year I asked hundreds of leaders if they felt their company was trailing others on AI adoption. Their nearly unanimously positive response confirmed my hunch: Organizations have been living through a bad case of FOMO (the fear of missing out). In this case, a universal fear of competitors getting a jump on them, both on innovation and on perceived cost savings, seemed to be driving their spending.
