Looking ahead: Despite widespread warnings of an imminent AI collapse, many top executives are still going all-in on artificial intelligence capital expenditures. Meanwhile, CEOs are growing increasingly disillusioned with the supposedly transformative capabilities of LLMs and chatbots.
A recent survey by PR advisory firm Teneo shows that a majority of CEOs from hundreds of publicly traded companies remain bullish on AI spending over the next year. It surveyed more than 350 executive clients at firms earning $1 billion or more in revenue between October and November 2025.
Teneo said 68 percent of CEOs plan to increase their organizations' AI spending in 2026. However, fewer than half of current implementation projects have delivered a return on investment. Artificial intelligence adoption has fared better in marketing and customer service workloads, while "high-risk" areas such as security, legal, and human resources remain more challenging.
Analysts have predicted that AI will cause significant disruption in the job market. Teneo's survey indicates that it might not be so bad, as 67 percent of companies currently expect to increase the number of entry-level positions. Meanwhile, 58 percent of surveyed executives anticipate growth in senior leadership roles.
Executives are showing mixed signals about the global economy. Among large firms, only 31 percent expect improvement in the first half of 2026, a steep decline from 51 percent a year ago. In contrast, 80 percent of CEOs at smaller companies anticipate economic improvement, slightly down from 83 percent previously. Corporations also cited US tariffs and geopolitical crises in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere as the most pressing issues they expect to face in the near future.
Meanwhile, Teneo surveyed roughly 400 institutional investors, including commercial and central banks, credit unions, government-controlled companies, and pension funds. It found that 53 percent of these organizations expect to see a return on investment from AI initiatives within the next six months.
The vast majority of large companies – those with $10 billion or more in revenue – believe AI projects will take more than six months to generate a profit. According to HSBC, it expects AI frontrunner OpenAI to continue losing hundreds of billions of dollars for the next several years.