AI Spend Is Doubling but Only 1% Are Mature

I had a call last week with a managing director who told me, straight-faced, that they'd "done AI." They'd bought Copilot licenses for the whole office. Six months in, nobody could point to a single thing that was faster, cheaper, or better.

Sound familiar? It's proper rampant right now. Companies spending a fortune on AI tools and getting absolutely nothing back.

The numbers are brutal

BCG dropped their AI Radar 2026 report recently, and the headline figure is staggering: corporate AI investment as a share of revenue has doubled year over year, now sitting at 1.7%. That's a massive jump. Boards are clearly throwing serious money at this.

But here's the kicker — only 1% of organisations consider themselves mature in AI deployment. One percent. After all that spend.

You can't buy maturity. You have to build it.

Harvard Business Review backed this up in July. Their research found that in the US, AI adoption is "wide but shallow" — McKinsey says 88% of US companies use AI in at least one function, but most can't show meaningful value from it. Everyone's got the tools. Almost nobody's changed how they actually work.

Why more spend doesn't mean more value

I see this all the time with UK SMEs. The thinking goes: buy the AI tool → people will use it → value appears automatically. But that's not how it works. It's like buying a fancy drill when you've got no blueprint, no wall marked up, and no idea where the pipes are.

BCG's research on AI-first operations found that companies seeing real value — we're talking 60% cost reductions or more — are the ones that redesign their processes end-to-end first. They don't just bolt AI onto existing workflows. They rethink the workflow entirely, then put AI where it fits.

The companies getting zero back? They bought tools. That's it. No process change, no data cleanup, no governance. Just licenses and hope.

What UK SMEs should actually do

Right, here's the practical bit. If you're an SME and you're feeling pressure to "do something with AI," do these three things before you spend another penny:

Pick one painful, repetitive process. Not five. One. Something that eats hours every week — invoice chasing, data entry, report generation. Start there and only there.
Make sure the data underneath is clean. If your AI is reading dodgy data, you'll get dodgy answers. Sort your source data, your master records, your KPI definitions. This is unglamorous work but it's the whole foundation.
Redesign the workflow before you add AI. Don't just automate a broken process — you'll just do the wrong thing faster. Map it out, cut the waste, then layer AI on top of the lean version.

That's it. No big platform purchase, no transformation programme, no 18-month roadmap. One process, clean data, better workflow. Get a win, show the team it works, then expand.

The 1% of companies that are actually mature? That's exactly what they did. They just started earlier and kept going.

References & Further Reading

BCG, AI-First Enterprise Operations: Reinventing the Operating System of Work (2026)
Harvard Business Review, U.S. and Japanese Companies Struggle with Different Parts of AI Adoption (July 2026)
McKinsey, The State of AI in 2026
BCG / Beri, $500M AI Bill, Zero ROI: Why Enterprises Are Flying Blind (August 2026)

Wasting money on AI tools that aren't delivering?

I help UK SMEs figure out what to fix before throwing more money at AI. Data readiness, process redesign, practical steps — the unsexy stuff that actually makes AI work.

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Matty Hatton is the founder of Digital Adaption, an ERP and data consultancy based on the Wirral. He has spent 15 years delivering ERP transformations for manufacturers, including leading the data migration on a £4.5m consolidation of four legacy systems onto a single Infor LN cloud instance for a 220-user group. He holds an MSc in Digital Transformation and IT Strategy from Manchester Metropolitan University and is Microsoft PL-200 certified.

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