Delivering Business Solutions
What selected research suggests about turning investment and activity into business outcomes.
Organisations can adopt technology, increase activity and improve individual tasks without seeing the same improvement in business performance. Selected research published in 2026 gives leaders useful reasons to examine what happens between investment, decisions, execution and outcomes.
The findings below bring external evidence together with the Ibcrus perspective. They cover different populations and questions; they should be read individually rather than combined into one measure of organisational performance.
EY reports that 23% of surveyed CEOs struggle to convert AI-driven productivity gains into measurable financial outcomes. Its October 2026 findings draw on 1,200 CEOs across 21 countries.
An improvement in one task can release capacity without changing the result the organisation needs. The useful question is what must happen next for that improvement to affect cost, revenue, service or delivery.
What to examine: Select one claimed productivity gain. Identify the business outcome it should change, who owns that outcome and which operating decisions connect the two. If that connection is unclear, more activity may make the improvement more visible without making its value more certain.
KPMG reports that 44% of insurance respondents place themselves in the top quartile for AI transformation, while 11% report strong data foundations and governance to scale AI.
These figures measure different things. Together, they invite scrutiny of the evidence behind a claim of readiness. Ibcrus looks at whether decisions, ownership and dependencies support the intended change as it moves into operation.
What to examine: Take one transformation commitment and test the conditions on which it depends. Which decisions have to hold? Which teams must change how they work? Who can resolve a dependency when competing priorities emerge?
Source: KPMG insurance research, 29 September 2026. Research covered insurance organisations with at least 500 employees across 20 countries; these percentages should not be generalised to other sectors or smaller businesses.
KPMG’s September AI Pulse reports that 64% of UK organisations surveyed assign accountability for AI-informed decisions at C-suite level or above.
Senior ownership establishes a point of responsibility. Its practical value depends on whether the organisation can resolve trade-offs and carry the resulting decisions through execution. A named owner alone does not show that this is happening.
What to examine: Follow a recent decision across the functions affected by it. When priorities conflicted, could someone resolve the issue? Did the decision continue to guide work, or did teams have to reconstruct it locally?
Source: KPMG AI Pulse, 25 September 2026. The global survey covered 2,131 senior leaders, including 101 UK respondents, in organisations with annual revenue of at least US$50 million; the US tracking sample used a higher threshold.
OECD’s 2026 D4SME survey finds that strategic, targeted and secure integration of AI into business operations remains uneven. Time constraints, maintenance costs and skills gaps continue to hinder implementation.
For a business owner, the practical question is whether a tool improves how work gets done and whether that improvement can be sustained. A new system can still leave work waiting, being repeated or returning to the owner for resolution.
What to examine: Choose one recurring delivery problem. Identify where work stops or returns, what decision is missing and whether the tool has changed that condition. This helps distinguish a technology requirement from an operating problem that needs attention first.
Source: OECD, Empowering SMEs in the age of AI, 13 April 2026. This is a non-representative sample of over 2,000 SMEs across 12 OECD countries, rather than an estimate for all UK SMEs.
If these findings reflect a programme or transformation in your organisation, For Corporate sets out the relevant enterprise route.
If you run a business and need to test whether recurring delivery symptoms form a wider pattern, start with the Delivery Scorecard.
Evidence reviewed: 6 October 2026. External findings are attributed to their publishers. The interpretations and questions are the Ibcrus perspective; the studies do not independently validate Organisational Decision Dynamics.