In 2024, IBM asked 2,000 CEOs where AI would be in their companies by 2026.

49% said it would be driving real growth. Only 13% expected to still be running pilots.

It's 2026 now. Want to guess what actually happened?

53% are still piloting. Only 10% have AI driving growth.

Just process that for a second. CEOs didn't miss by a few points. They got the entire shape of the chart wrong.

And the interesting part of this study is..

While CEOs were waiting for AI to arrive in some big obvious way.. it already arrived. Just in disguise. 25% of operational decisions inside these same companies are already being made by software. Without humans. Pricing changes. Inventory allocation. Shipment routing. Incident response.

A quarter of how the company actually runs.. is already AI.