Global leaders’ confidence in their organizations’ artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives grows strong, according to a Deloitte study, as eight out of ten organizations (78 percent) expect to increase their overall AI spending in the next fiscal year.

The study also reveals that generative AI (Gen AI) significantly increased its proportion of the total AI budget compared to the previous year, as the share of organizations allocating 20 percent–39 percent of their total AI budget to Gen AI rose by 12 percentage points, whereas the share of organizations dedicating less than 20 percent of their AI budget to Gen AI decreased by 6 percentage points.

In terms of challenges faced by organizations when developing and implementing Gen AI tools and applications, regulatory compliance (38 percent) has emerged as the top barrier, increasing by 10 percentage points compared to last year, followed by difficulties in managing risks (32 percent) and in implementation (27 percent). Setting the appropriate governance foundation will require perseverance and a strategic approach, as seven out of ten organizations (69 percent) say fully implementing a governance strategy will take over a year to resolve.

C-suite leaders (CxOs) manifest a greater level of optimism about their organizations’ Gen AI implementations compared to other participants to the study. Two out of ten CxOs (21 percent) reported they feel Gen AI is already transforming their organization, compared to only 8 percent of non-C-suite respondents. When it comes to barriers in deploying and developing Gen AI, CxOs are less worried than non-executive employes about challenges such as trust, risk management, governance and regulatory compliance. Executives also have a more optimistic view of how their organization responds to these challenges, as only 47 percent of them believe it will take 12 months or more to overcome scaling barriers, compared to 60 percent of non-CxO respondents.

“Despite the technology’s rapid pace, business leaders continue to wonder when it will meet their transformational expectations. The report shows that most companies are transforming at the speed of organizational change, not at the speed of technology. It recommends that leaders should stay curious and challenge the orthodoxies of their organizations. While uncertainty about specific outcomes and their timing is unavoidable, executives should focus on what they can control – namely, organizational readiness, particularly in areas such as data, risk management, governance, regulatory compliance and talent” said Alexandru Reff, Country Managing Partner, Deloitte Romania and Moldova.

The study also shows that agentic AI (52 percent) – software solutions designed to complete tasks and meet objectives with little or no human supervision – and multiagent systems (45 percent) – a more advanced variant of agentic AI – are seen by leaders as the most interesting technologies in the future development of Gen AI. Many organizations have already explored autonomous agent development, with 68 percent of them already doing so to a moderate or large extent. However, organizations are still exploring the potential of Gen AI as over two-thirds of respondents said that 30 percent or fewer of their current experiments will be fully scaled in the next three to six months.

Even though scaling is still a work in progress, the return on investment (ROI) for organizations with the most advanced Gen AI initiatives has been positive, as 74 percent of respondents report that their projects are meeting or exceeding their ROI expectations. The study points out that IT (28 percent) is the top function in which Gen AI initiatives are the most advanced. Outside the IT functions, the most advanced Gen AI applications target areas such as marketing (especially in the consumer sector), operations (in energy, resources and industrials) and cybersecurity (especially in financial services).