Monday Morning Impact – September 21
Gartner: Only 22% of Organizations Have Successfully Scaled AI Across Multiple Business Units
Only 22% of organizations have successfully scaled AI across multiple business units or adopted an AI-first approach according to a survey by Gartner. Roughly 11% of organizations are entirely unaware of what their function spent on AI in 2025.
A Gartner survey from January-April 2026 of 1,303 respondents from organizations with enterprise-wide annual revenue of at least $50 million in fiscal year 2025 found that, despite this lack of success, investment in AI continues to accelerate. Eighty-five percent of functional leaders plan to increase spending in 2026 after dedicating an average of 12% of their functional budgets to AI in 2025.
“This lack of financial visibility heightens risk as spending accelerates,” said Tina Nunno, Distinguished Vice President & Gartner Fellow. “Without disciplined measurement tied directly to business outcomes, organizations risk wasted resources and unmet expectations.”
High performers – companies that constantly track ROI of AI initiatives, treat AI as a portfolio of value and regularly assess project performance and reallocate or discontinue underperforming initiatives – reported positive returns in 81% of their AI initiatives, while low performers reported they did not know the rate of return for 29% of AI initiatives.
Furthermore, most functions are prioritizing productivity gains over bold transformation or new revenue streams. Productivity was a key target outcome for 75% of functional leaders, and it commands approximately 30% of functional AI spend on average; nearly twice the percentage of the next highest objective.
“Functional leaders who track every dollar spent by outcome category, such as productivity, revenue growth, risk mitigation, or innovation, are best positioned to defend investments and reallocate quickly if their projects underperform,” said Nunno. “Without disciplined measurement tied directly to business objectives, organizations open themselves up to misallocation and missed opportunities as scrutiny intensifies.”
The most widely pursued AI use cases are rarely the ones delivering the highest positive returns. Functional leaders are frequently falling into the trap of prioritizing “popular” or heavily hyped AI applications over those that generate tangible value.
When contrasting the top three use cases pursued with AI versus the top three use cases with the largest proportion of leaders reporting positive returns, a clear disconnect emerges for IT. Cybersecurity threat detection and response (54%), IT service desk automation (54%) and automated code generation and refactoring (44%) were all identified as the most frequently pursued AI use cases by C-suite leaders. However, intelligent IT asset and cost optimization (40%), synthetic data generation (28%) and automated code generation and refactoring (23%) were identified as the top three AI use cases with positive returns.
“Organizations are seeing the greatest quantifiable value from less common, strategically selected use cases that are closely aligned to their unique business needs,” added Nunno. “CEOs and CIOs must pinpoint which AI use cases truly drive positive financial returns, so they can set clear, effective targets for every function and leader.”
Channel Impact®
The data demonstrate that there is opportunity for partners to take a lead role in helping their clients get the most out of AI, at a strategic level.
The AI Confidence Trap: Feeling Fluent Isn’t the Same as Being Effective
A confidence trap has taken hold in U.S. workplaces: employees feel fluent with artificial intelligence, but for many the results don’t yet match that confidence. This is according to the “AI at Work Pulse Survey” by San Francisco-based WalkMe, an SAP company which has tracked U.S. workers’ use of AI since 2024. The study finds that while 90% of employees feel confident using AI, only 24.6% say it works on the first try, and 50.2% say they have spent more time trying to get AI to do a task than the task itself would have taken manually.
More than half of employees (51%) say AI has led their manager or team to expect more output in the same amount of time. Under that pressure, appearances become a survival skill: 33% of employees say they have pretended to be more skilled with AI than they actually are, and 32.5% have passed off AI-generated work as their own.
Notably, this is a persistent gap rather than an escalating trend. On the questions the survey has tracked since 2025, admissions fell year over year: the share of employees who say they have pretended to know AI in a meeting dropped from 45.2% in 2025 to 28.3% in 2026, and passing off AI work as one’s own fell from 48.7% to 32.5%.
The pressure to perform exists at every level of the organization. More than half of employees surveyed (53.6 %) say they have felt that a senior leader does not fully understand the AI strategy they are publicly championing. The people setting AI strategy are learning these tools in real time, just like the rest of the workforce.
Gen Z is the most confident generation (94.1%) and also the most likely to overstate its skills: 45% of Gen Z workers say they pretended to be more skilled with AI than they are, versus 13% of Baby Boomers. That pretending caused a real problem at work, such as an output mistake, a missed deadline, a bad decision, or lost trust, for 31% of Gen Z, versus 7% of Boomers.
The survey was conducted in June among 2,037 working U.S. adults who use AI on the job.
Channel Impact®
Partners are ideally positioned to help users leverage guidance and support built into the tools they already use every day, ahead of separate, standalone training.
Exclaimer launches Program to Simplify Billing and Management for MSPs
Exclaimer, a Boston- and London-based email signature management company, has rolled out “MSP Connect,” a new partner program designed to help MSPs provision, manage and grow centralized email signature services across multiple customer environments. The program provides a centrally-managed service across Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace that brings together a consumption-based commercial model, a redesigned self-service portal, dedicated channel support and not-for-resale licensing.
Additional elements include Professional Services Automation (PSA) integrations, access to a channel account manager, and a directory used to populate approved signature attributes across Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Depending on the customer environment, an MSP can deploy the service in under an hour, without a heavy integration project or mandatory professional services.
For end customers, centralized management keeps brand assets, employee details and legal disclaimers consistent across outgoing email without relying on individual users to apply updates.
MSP Connect is globally available for the company’s partners.
Channel Impact®
MSPs can offer signature template design, create template catalogs for customers, and bundle Exclaimer into a broader Microsoft 365 or managed services package. Their customers’ marketing teams can use approved campaign banners, engagement analytics and rules-based signature content, while IT retains centralized control over deployment and governance.
Stay in the Know
Keep tabs on what’s happening in the channel and the impact it will have on the partner community by subscribing to Channel Impact communications.
Recent News
Search Buzz
Buzz Categories
