United Kingdom52% of UK CFOs expect AI to cut headcount
Deloitte — 52% of UK finance chiefs polled by Deloitte foresee AI headcount cuts. Only a quarter of the change they ultimately anticipate has arrived for 67%, so workforce impact remains largely forecast.
Industrial Research Unit · Straits Institute for Applied AI
Applied AI in Strategy & Leadership
Every entry is dated and traced to a named source: 9 pieces of evidence of adoption, 4 deployments and 3 pieces of evidence of impact.
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16 entries
AustriaAustrian firms' AI maturity rises from 30 to 36 points, McKinsey finds
McKinsey & Company with the Industriellenvereinigung (IV) Task Force KI — McKinsey's State of AI in Austria update with the Federation of Austrian Industries' AI task force scores average corporate AI maturity at 36 on a 0-100 scale, against 30 a year before. Answers came from 135 tech and digital chiefs at 54 firms. Seven in ten lack hard metrics showing whether that AI readiness pays off.
BrazilSebrae adds a Gemini AI agent to its PNBOX+ business-planning platform
Sebrae — Sebrae has built an AI business-planning assistant on Google's Gemini into PNBOX+, free on the Sebrae Portal since 23 September. The conversational agent guides Brazil's entrepreneurs through a plan, clarifies management ideas and poses questions; technical director Bruno Quick stressed that the tool backs owners rather than drafting plans. PNBOX+ logged over 167,000 consultations, almost 18,000 active users and more than 200,000 plans in 2026.
South AfricaReunert rolls out AI tools across all 17 business units
Reunert Group — Anthonie de Beer, group CEO of JSE-listed Reunert, has pushed AI in corporate business units across 17 divisions, leaning on Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot. His goal: grow revenue, not cut jobs — staff now move faster through decisions, research and meeting prep. Engineering teams have added AI-powered analytics too, an AI adoption across company divisions finishing jobs far quicker.
Bermuda62% of Bermuda directors say AI investment is paying off
PwC Bermuda — PwC's Caribbean Corporate Governance Survey 2026 - Bermuda Edition, June 2026, has 62 per cent of Bermuda directors seeing gains from AI and generative AI spending, yet only 29 per cent credit management with delivering AI and GenAI strategy. AI governance ties cybersecurity as top risk, each primary for 24 per cent; 41 per cent back the board's capacity to oversee AI and GenAI plans, 37 per cent confirm a formal route for AI-related opportunities and risks, 37 per cent report thin board education. Just 7 per cent rate AI expertise top when recruiting, and PwC Bermuda partner Marisa Savage said boardrooms now demand different skills, leaving board AI oversight short.
GuernseyChannel Islands chief executives report thin returns from AI
PwC Channel Islands — PwC's Channel Islands CEO Survey 2026, 'Catalysing competitiveness in the age of AI', polled 45 chief executives across Guernsey and Jersey. Channel Islands AI adoption looks shallow: 58% doubt the firm can shift quickly enough to match technology, and merely 8% see revenue rise and costs fall together. On AI maturity, just 15% have sufficiently many of the seven foundations for success; 80% deem innovation indispensable, yet only 9% claim solid innovation footings.
Evidence of adoptionGlobal2026
88% of surveyed organisations now use AI, AI Index finds
88% of surveyed organisations used AI in 2025, up from 78% in 2024, the 2026 AI Index reports. 70% used generative AI in at least one business function.
Evidence of adoptionGlobal2026
56% of CEOs saw no revenue or cost gains from AI investments
56% of chief executives saw no revenue rise or cost fall from AI investments over the past 12 months. PwC's 29th Global CEO Survey (January 2026) polled 4,454 CEOs in 95 countries.
Evidence of adoptionGlobal2026
Only 28% of firms report CEO-level oversight of AI governance
About 28% of respondents at AI-using organisations report CEO-level oversight of AI governance, and roughly 17% board-level, McKinsey's State of AI: Global Survey 2026 (published August 2026) finds. Top-level oversight has barely moved in a year.
Evidence of adoptionGlobal2026
76% of organisations now have a Chief AI Officer
76% of organisations now have a Chief AI Officer, up from 26% a year earlier. The fastest-growing C-suite role shows AI governance climbing the org chart.
Evidence of impactGlobal2026
74% of AI's economic value goes to just 20% of companies
Just 20% of companies, the 'AI leaders', capture 74% of AI's economic value through growth and reinvention, not productivity alone. It is a stark value gap.
Evidence of adoptionGlobal2026
Only 34% of organisations use AI to deeply transform work
Only 34% of organisations use AI to transform their work deeply, with 'talent readiness' the weakest capability at 20%, down 2 points in a year. The bottleneck is depth of transformation rather than adoption.
Evidence of impactGlobal2026
Only 37% of firms report enterprise-level profit impact from AI
Although roughly 88-90% of organisations report using AI, only about 37% say it has produced enterprise-level EBIT impact, roughly unchanged on a year earlier, McKinsey's State of AI: Global Survey 2026 finds. That is the adoption-to-value gap in one number.
Evidence of impactGlobal2026
MIT study finds 95% of enterprise AI pilots show no profit impact
About 95% of enterprise generative-AI pilots showed no measurable P&L impact and only 5% captured significant value, an MIT study reported. Caution: it is self-labelled 'preliminary findings', not peer-reviewed, its methodology has been publicly questioned, and its authors at MIT Media Lab's Project NANDA build AI-agent infrastructure, a structural conflict of interest.
JapanKirin puts an AI executive called CoreMate on its management committee
Kirin Holdings Company, Limited — CoreMate, an AI executive built by Kirin Holdings, now sits on the Kirin Group Executive Committee to guide corporate strategy. 12 distinct AI personas power it, drawing on 10 years' worth of board records, internal files and outside sources, then producing the issues and viewpoints that emerge when those personas debate each other during live meetings. Operating-company executive committees and Kirin's board of directors are next in line for this AI boardroom assistant.
Deployment
United States
United StatesModerna staff build over 750 custom GPTs in two months
Moderna rolled out OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise company-wide and let staff build AI assistants; in about two months they created over 750 custom GPTs across legal, research, manufacturing and commercial functions. Legal reached 100 per cent adoption, the highest of any department, the company says.
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