Deloitte 2026 State of AI Report - The Untapped Edge

**Ray Rike** (0:08)
Welcome to the AI to ROI podcast, The Big Story episode. I'm Ray Rike. I'm Foundering CEO of Benchmarkit.

**Peter Buchanan** (0:19)
And I'm Peter Buchanan. I'm the managing partner of Newplan.

**Ray Rike** (0:22)
And this is the weekly Big Story episode that Peter and I do together, where we dive in to what we think is the big story of the week from our AI to ROI newsletter. And we do five editions every week. And this week, we picked something that I was really enamored about. So Peter, what are we going to be discussing today?

**Peter Buchanan** (0:42)
We're going to be discussing a report on AI in 2026 from Deloitte that's super comprehensive. It concentrates on the enterprise. It looks at the C suite all the way down to individual workers. And it could be really helpful to companies that are really diving into making their AI projects going to production this year. Okay.

**Ray Rike** (1:06)
And the nice thing is this is an annual report. So you also get to see some trends. It is a 41 page report. Once again, the Deloitte 2026, State of AI Report. And we covered that on our February 19th edition of the newsletter, which you can see at Substack. That's ai2roi.substack.com.
And Peter, the report, they called it out this year, the Untapped Edge. So first of all, I thought about edge computing and then I'm like, no, I think maybe this is a polite way of saying that the survey found we have a massive inventory of untapped AI potential. Is that right?

**Peter Buchanan** (1:47)
It is right. And there are sort of seven areas that Deloitte looks at as inflection points. The first is the one everyone talks about AI moving from pilot and experimentation phase to the enterprise as workers get expanded access to AI and AI use cases. The second is transformation of productivity, reimagining businesses around AI, which is a big quest.
The third is companies are focusing on AI fluency of their employees so that they have the skills to actually take advantage of these use cases and help the company. The fourth is, of course, agentic AI, so we've had three years of generative AI getting better and better, but agents are here now. The fifth is sovereign AI because a lot of companies do business all around the world and they have to comply with countries where they do business. The sixth is physical AI, which is sort of snuck in. And it's with all the devices and control systems you have. And lastly, it's how leaders are thinking about AI. And there's a little bit of a shift this year. They feel like they understand the strategy and where they want to go. But of course, they look at it and say, oh, gosh, the devils are in the details. So let's get let's get started, Ray, with just the first part here, the pilot enterprise scaling part. What's the report saying?

**Ray Rike** (3:15)
Well, before we actually get into that pilot to full commercial scaling, I want to talk a little bit about just access at the individual level, right? So the report says that Workforce Access AI has expanded by 50% year over year, growing from 40% of workers have sanctioned access. And that's very important. People have been using ChatGPT outside of the firewalls for a while, but it was 40% were sanctioned last year, 60% in 2025 So that's nice. 11% of leading companies actually are providing workers with near universal access to sanctioned AI tools more than 80%.
However, even though 60% of workers have access to sanctioned AI tools, only 60%... So if you do that kind of math, it means 36% of employees are actually using AI in their daily workflows. So... And that hasn't changed. And there's some good details in the report about what percent of employees aggressively adopt it and what people actually kind of do the pocket embargo. So a key question for me was, okay, so we're getting better at sanctioning and approving tools. We have, you know, 60% of people have access to those tools. But I still remember that MIT report on are people actually implementing AI in proof of concept or pilots? And then are they converting that into full scale commercial enterprise wide deployment? What did the report say, Peter, about this?

**Peter Buchanan** (4:56)
Well, I mean, the report said it's definitely the pilot to production is definitely the most important step and companies are stalling and they struggle to scale and find measurable success. They've had that struggle all of 2025 going into 2026 But this year, enterprises seem to be more positive. So 25% of the respondents said that their organizations have moved 40% or more of their experiments into production. That's a big jump from the previous year. And then the other thing that's very interesting is that the respondents, over 3300 respondents to the Deloitte surveys, 54% of them said that they expect the next three to six months that they're going to get a huge leap in shifting pilots into production. So these respondents think their companies are ready, ready to go.