Annual Report - Signature Research
AI Outlook 2026: The Annual Enterprise AI Report from Elixir Global
Our annual assessment of enterprise AI across the Gulf, India, and Southeast Asia -- where adoption is stalling, where leaders are pulling ahead, and the decisions that will separate the two groups over the next 18 months.
What This Report Covers
The Elixir AI Outlook is our annual assessment of enterprise AI adoption across the markets where we work. It draws on structured interviews with technology and operations leaders, supplemented by performance data from our active client engagements and a quantitative survey of enterprise decision-makers.
This year's report is organised around a central question: why do some enterprises compound returns from AI while most remain stuck in the pilot phase? The answer, based on our research, is not primarily about technology choice. It is about a set of decisions -- about problem framing, data infrastructure, governance, and programme design -- that the leaders make and the laggards do not.
Key Findings
The Pilot Trap Is Getting More Expensive
73% of enterprises in our research reported AI pilots that did not scale to production. The cost of these failed transitions has increased as pilot scope has grown. Enterprises that launched narrow, targeted pilots in 2023 typically wrote off less than USD 200,000 when those pilots did not scale. Enterprises launching the broader, more ambitious pilots common in 2025 are writing off significantly more. The trap is the same. The price of falling into it has risen.
The Data Foundation Gap Is Widening
The single most consistent predictor of AI programme success in our research is the quality of the data foundation the programme is built on. Enterprises with mature data governance, high data quality in key operational domains, and integrated data infrastructure across their core systems are generating returns from AI that are 4 times the returns of enterprises without these foundations. The gap is not closing. It is widening, because the enterprises with good foundations are now in their second and third AI deployment cycles, compounding learning and infrastructure investment.
Agentic AI Is Moving from Concept to Deployment
The most significant shift we observed compared with our 2025 research is the movement of agentic AI from a topic of discussion to a subject of active deployment. 23% of enterprises in our research have at least one agentic workflow in production -- a workflow where an AI agent takes actions, not just recommendations, without human review at each step. 45% have agentic deployments in pilot. The remaining 32% are in planning or have not yet started. The performance differences between these groups are beginning to be visible in operational metrics.
Gulf Markets Are Closing the Gap
Enterprise AI adoption in the Gulf has accelerated significantly in the past 18 months. The combination of Vision 2030 momentum, active regulatory support for digital transformation, and a cohort of technology-forward enterprise leaders is producing adoption rates that now exceed comparable markets in Western Europe on several dimensions. The Gulf is not yet at global frontier -- the frontier remains in the US and China -- but the pace of closure is faster than our 2025 research suggested it would be.
Download the Full AI Outlook 2026 Report
The complete report includes sector-by-sector analysis, full benchmark data across all six markets, CFO and CDO perspectives, and Elixir's recommended priority actions for enterprise AI leaders in 2026.
