De Bellefonds agrees, and that catching up isn’t a competition for the “highest number of use cases.” That’s in part because leaders are seeing the value of the technology and reinvesting their returns. Those included in the study plan to spend twice as much on IT this year and direct more of that IT budget specifically to AI.
The impact of agentic AI is one of the fastest accelerators. What once seemed like a buzzword is now proving its mettle, as the report estimates agentic AI—systems that reason, learn, and act autonomously across workflows—account for 17 percent of AI value in 2025 and could reach 29 percent by 2028. To achieve that value, the research shows that deeply integrating agentic AI into the area that’s been identified as most important to the company—like the marketing or supply chain areas that Luther referenced—is best practice.
Like any transformation that has a significant ROI, it takes time. And hard work.
“There’s this misconception that AI is this magic wand and integrating it will be easy—that you just have to plug this tool and voila! it all works out,” says de Bellefonds. “That misconception, frankly, is often pushed by some AI providers. The fact is, it takes a bit of hard work to really transform how you work and how you operate. People underestimate that. Maybe because they want to believe that it’s easy. The report shows there is real value, but it only works if you do the real transformative work that goes with it.”
That means AI failure is not often about the model being used. The report found that most roadblocks are human and organizational, like aligning strategies, training, getting people to actually use the tools, handling unstructured data, and setting clear goals. Companies that skip the groundwork—operating model, skills, guardrails—struggle to scale, no matter how clear their prompts or clean their coding.
“We always had this rule of thumb we called 10, 20, 70,” Luther says. The rule suggests that success with AI relies 10 percent on the algorithms, 20 percent on the tech, and 70 percent on the people. With this longitudinal study, “it actually proves out… that it is really all about the people.” Done well, she adds, AI “takes the toil out of the day-to-day” and “creates more joy in the job” because humans spend more time on judgment and creativity.
The performance case for AI, it turns out, is also a human case.