Pressure for return on AI investment mounts within organizations: Report

For the past few years, corporate investment into AI startups and in-house R&D have skyrocketed, hitting $252 billion globally in 2024, according to Stanford researchers. 

Now, pressure is mounting for companies to see returns on those investments, according to a  new report from Solvd. 

In December, the AI advisory and engineering firm surveyed 500 U.S.-based CIOs and CTOs at companies with at least $500M in annual revenue. 

Last week, they published their results, which found that while 90% report increased AI investment, 72% believe their company is likely to shut down an AI project in the next year based solely on not meeting KPIs.

The disconnect could signal a gap between CIOs and CTOs and other executives on AI investment and value realization timelines. 

“As the market matures, we have to rethink traditional IT approaches,” said Solvd CEO Mike Hulbert in a statement. 

After the meteoric rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, companies across the globe began throwing money at AI initiatives without clear intentions or guidelines. The result: last year, MIT researchers found that 95% of generative AI pilots were failing. 

Now, it seems that companies are beginning to take a more measured approach to their AI adoption. 

According to Solvd, nearly half (49%) of CIOs and CTOs foresee more data-driven and less hype-based expectations around AI in the coming year. 

“As the nature of AI expectations becomes more data-driven and investment in AI grows, the pressure to justify the returns on investment increases,” read the report. 

Will this slow down investment into AI projects? Probably not. 

The researchers found that despite poor short-term ROI, enterprises are continuing to fund AI research and development, signalling that executives still see AI transformation as a long-term priority. 

However, executives are being more cautious about how AI projects are overseen and governed. 

A report last year from Solvd found that 97% of CIOs and CTOs worried about AI ethics, yet only 38% had oversight in place. 

In their most recent survey, nearly 100% of CIOs and CTOs confirmed they have begun to establish governance on their AI projects, a major turnaround from just a year ago. 

The company argues that a lack of oversight is a reason why many AI projects fail. 

“AI initiative failure is not rare, and is often associated with challenges related to visibility, coordination, and management rather than technology limitations,” read the report. 

Rise of the Chief AI Officer 

Part of the lack of governance ties back to a lack of accountability for AI projects. 

Thirty-nine percent of executives responded that CTOs were responsible for AI initiatives at their companies while 36% said it fell under the responsibility of the Chief Information Officer.  

Another 19% pointed to newly-created roles such as Head of AI or Chief AI Officer as those who are accountable for such initiatives. 

CAIO’s have taken a more prominent role inside companies in the past couple of years, in step with the worldwide AI boom. 

IBM found that the number of companies with CAIO’s jumped from 11% in 2023, to 26% in 2025. 

What initially began as a vanity role to show that organizations were taking AI seriously has since developed into a C-suite role within some organizations that aims to embed AI into operations, establish governance and ethical use, calculate ROI and impact and more. 

“As AI initiatives scale beyond isolated pilots, unclear ownership and limited visibility become material execution risks,” read the Solvd report. 

Just as roles are emerging, KPI’s for AI initiatives are also setting into place. According to the report, three-quarters of CIOs and CTOs believe their company is likely to shutter an AI project in the coming year for failing to meet KPIs. 

For some executives, this isn’t a bad thing. Last year, Lori Beer, the global chief information officer at JPMorgan, told The New York Times that the investment bank has shut down numerous AI projects. 

“We’re absolutely shutting things down,” Beer said at the time. “We’re not afraid to shut things down. We don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think it’s a smart thing.”

Not even the biggest AI companies are immune from shuttering certain projects. In late March, OpenAI announced it was closing down Sora, its video creation platform. Analysts opine that the cost of processing billions of inquiries for AI video generation could have been the reason. 

Even while AI continues to take the lion’s share of investment, it seems that pressure for returns is changing the way companies approach AI implementation. 

“So much of today’s conversations around AI are focused on the extremes, but the situation on the ground is far more nuanced,” Hulbert, Solvd’s CEO said. “The reality is, most companies are still in active experimentation mode; only 20% have found high-value use cases for AI at this stage.”

Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.