As organizations move from isolated AI use cases to enterprise-wide adoption, they are blowing past their AI budgets, according to a recent McKinsey survey. While 62 percent of organizations have moved beyond experimentation to active deployment of AI, 93 percent of respondents report exceeding their AI budgets. Businesses that develop the capabilities to optimize spend, improve accountability, and redirect savings toward the highest-value opportunities could reduce their AI costs by 20 to 30 percent, note McKinsey’s Pankaj Sachdeva, Wasim Lala, and coauthors.
To read the article, see “The cost of intelligence: How CIOs can manage AI demand at scale,” July 20, 2026.