The Big Inventory: Lessons from Global Leaders
If the world has spent the last two years in a state of endless pilots and excitement, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the “Big Inventory.” The KPMG Global Tech Report 2026, which surveyed 2,500 technology and financial leaders, delivers a stark sobering message:
• Value does not equal ROI. 74% of companies report “indirect benefits”—for example, employee satisfaction—but only 24% confirm achieving a scalable return on investment that can be captured in the profit and loss statement.
• Efficiency gap. The average ROI in the IT investment market is around 200%, while for leaders it reaches 450%. This gap is due to the leaders’ ruthless closure of ineffective projects at any stage.
• From Substitution ROI to Augmentation ROI. Harvard Business Review experts in the February 2026 issue highlight a critical shift: market leaders are abandoning the pursuit of Substitution ROI (simply replacing people with code) and focusing on Augmentation ROI. The question is not how many employees a bot will replace, but how much faster a company will launch new products and how much the cost of making mistakes in strategic decisions will decrease. In their latest report, “CFOs Need to Rethink the ROI of AI Investments” (March 2026), Gartner analysts go even further: they urge financial management to abandon the search for a single ROI formula for AI. Artificial intelligence should be viewed as a portfolio of diverse bets, not a monolithic project. Each has its own economic profile, risks, and planning horizon. Trying to measure them with a single yardstick guarantees an overestimation of value.
However, the key limitation remains the same: technological debt. 63% of companies report that fragmented data and legacy systems prevent even successful pilots from scaling. Research confirms that AI projects succeed when they are led by a business leader whose bonus is directly tied to financial results, not the CIO.