1st September – London – EBM NEWSDESK ANALYSIS
Businesses are accelerating AI investment as part of their transformation strategies, but governance, skills, data quality and change management are failing to keep pace, according to new research published ahead of the 28th annual Business Transformation World Summit (BTWS), the leading global event for the enterprise transformation community.
Drawing on responses from 185 transformation leaders globally between May and August 2026, the State of Business Transformation 2026/27 Report found that agentic AI is now the most planned investment for business transformation, with nearly 60% of respondents planning to invest in it over the next 12 months, up just under 40% last year.
However, the structures needed to govern AI have failed to keep pace with its rapid adoption. Fewer than half of organisations (46%) have an AI governance policy in place, an increase of just three percentage points from last year, while 27% have neither a policy nor plans to introduce one.
The gap is becoming apparent in how businesses measure the value of their AI investments too. Respondents citing a lack of clear ROI as a barrier to AI adoption rose sharply from 23% to 38%.
The report also highlighted that while AI (61%) has now overtaken change management (53%) as the most used process for business transformation, transformation success is still reliant on managing change well. Change management is now the biggest transformation challenge (54%), over taking cost.
The data shows that the role of transformation itself is changed. Top-line growth has become the leading measure of transformation success (33%) more than twice the proportion measuring success through cost savings (16%).
Cathy Gu, event director at BTWS, commented: “New technology is helping the business transformation community change at unprecedented speed, but as a discipline itself concerned with change and improvement, it’s imperative to ensure that any implementation of these tools is paired with deep, strategic work to ensure that they work well, safely and effectively. Layering new AI tools on top of fragmented data, legacy systems, and weak plans won’t work. What will, is pairing them with a clear understanding of what role they can play, strong guardrails, trained staff and effective human-led strategy.”
Crystal Broj, Enterprise Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Medical University of South Carolina and a member of the BTWS community said: “The pace of AI adoption is accelerating faster than many organizations’ ability to put the right foundations around it. Investment in agentic AI is exciting, but technology alone doesn’t create transformation. Governance, trusted data, clear measures of value, workforce readiness and change management have to advance alongside it. Without those disciplines, organizations risk scaling complexity and risk rather than scaling value. The opportunity now is to move beyond experimenting with AI and build the governance and operating models that allow us to deploy it responsibly, measure its impact and earn the trust of the people we serve.”
Over 600 attendees will attend the 28th annual BTWS event January 25-27, 2027 at the Hilton Orlando Lake Buena Area, to discuss the future of enterprise transformation. The largest event for the community, BTWS will bring together the enterprise transformation community for three days of discussion, networking and expert-led learning. Speakers include Condé Nast, PepsiCo, Pfizer and Omnicom.
