EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook: only 16% of CEOs have real-time AI cost visibility and high confidence in the return

Only 16% of CEOs say they have detailed, real-time visibility into what AI costs them and high confidence in the return. That is the number I would take into any board discussion about scaling AI.

It comes from the latest EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook survey of 1,200 CEOs, run in August and September. The picture is mixed rather than bleak. A further 56% report reliable visibility into most of their costs and reasonable confidence in returns, and EY's Australian commentary says more than half of Australian CEOs can assess AI return on investment with confidence. But that leaves a sizeable group who cannot yet say whether AI creates more value than it consumes.

The survey also shows where the gains go. Nearly half of CEOs (48%) say productivity gains are reinvested in growth, innovation or transformation, while 23% say they are absorbed by complexity, regulation, risk or new work. EY's phrase for the risk is that capacity disappears into complexity and friction, and I think that describes it well. A saving nobody measures is also a saving nobody decides how to spend.

EY's Australian commentary adds a tension worth sitting with: organisations are getting more sophisticated at measuring AI spend, yet relatively few Australian CEOs name AI-enabled tools as one of the biggest contributors to the productivity gains they achieved over the past year. Better cost tracking has not yet turned into visible value.

EY's own advice is to measure outcomes rather than adoption, and to capture the full cost of AI, including integration, cybersecurity, governance, process change and training, which can change the investment case. My extension, not EY's: the board question is therefore not "how many pilots" but "what did last quarter's AI spend return, in output or unit cost, and where did the freed capacity go?

If you cannot answer that in one sentence, what exactly are you scaling?

Source: EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook, "AI in business: How CEOs turn productivity into growth", Oct 2026, https://lnkd.in/geb5ZVyx

#Leadership #Productivity #Governance