April 03, 2026
Forrester Reveals Why Most Businesses are not Seeing AI Impact
According to Forrester’s latest report, three years into the generative AI era, most enterprises are struggling to turn AI investment into measurable business impact. Its latest Accelerate Your AI Voyage report identifies a list of actions that successful frontrunners or “high AI adopters” are enacting, as well as four barriers and solutions to grow a company’s ROI.
A Common Problem
The global research and advisory firm found that low AI fluency among employees, an overemphasis on internal productivity use cases, difficulty measuring impact, and siloed adoption within individual functions were the main obstacles hampering AI outcomes.
Sharyn Leaver, Chief Research Officer at Forrester, explains that many enterprises are “paralysed” by disconnected AI systems and a lack of experience integrating them. Leaver also believes that there is a limited timeframe with which to establish yourself as an industry leader: “Businesses that prioritise customer-led AI experiences will ultimately build trust and long-term value. The window to outpace competitors is open, and those who act decisively will be the best positioned to succeed.”
MIT’s NANDA initiative paints a stark picture of the broader landscape. Its report, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, found that despite between $30 billion and $40 billion in enterprise investment into generative AI globally, 95 per cent of organisations are seeing zero return. Just five per cent of integrated AI pilots are generating significant value, while the majority deliver no measurable impact on profit and loss.
Keeping CX in the Cross-Hairs
The report acknowledges that it is easy to focus AI investments internally but encourages enterprises to take more of a “customer-led approach”. While 52 per cent of high adopters focus their efforts on customer experience, thereby helping to build value and trust, only 44 per cent of low adopters manage this. The gap is even wider in marketing optimisation, where 48 per cent of high adopters prioritise it against just 30 per cent of low adopters.
Research from Freshworks, which examined how AI is reshaping service and support roles, shows how improvements in agent satisfaction and productivity can reduce service costs and feed through to the customer. The issue arises when AI is deployed primarily to streamline internal operations, with customer impact treated as a secondary benefit. As a result, the value chain becomes harder to trace and harder to defend. Forrester argues the logic should run the other way: start with the customer outcome first.
Leadership at the top is a further factor uncovered in the report. Among high adopters, 25 per cent report that the CEO is directly driving their AI business strategy, more than any other executive role. Forrester argues the CEO is best placed to anchor AI strategy in customer impact and drive alignment across the organisation.
High adopters also invest more deliberately in foundations. Almost half work with consulting partners to prepare their data and systems, compared with 26 per cent of low adopters. From a talent perspective, 47 per cent specify AI skill requirements in job descriptions and 54 per cent require applicants to demonstrate those skills at interview, against 33 per cent and 29 per cent respectively among low adopters.
Key ROI Drivers
Forrester identifies four areas to set yourself apart from the majority of businesses failing to see AI impact the bottom line. These include defining business outcomes and success metrics upfront; identifying use cases aligned to those outcomes; establishing a structured runway to plan, test, and time deployment; and scaling through cloud infrastructure, frontier models, and embedded agents.
Another essential practice is ensuring that the impacts of AI are being effectively measured. According to the Larridin 2025 State of Enterprise AI Report, 81 per cent of enterprises say hidden or untracked AI usage makes it difficult to measure returns on investment, while half cite it as their single biggest governance challenge. CallMiner’s 2025 CX Landscape Report also found that 62 per cent of organisations fail to act on the data they collect, with 98 per cent revealing that aligning customer feedback across departments was a significant challenge.
Not only is it important to take action on data and across all these areas, as Leaver observes, the speed at which this happens will ultimately separate the leaders from the laggards.
