AI Is Eating Your Strategy

For the past 18 months, companies have considered where AI belongs on the strategic agenda. That debate is nearly over. In Wave 3 of the AI, Applied Benchmarks, 93% of B2B software decision makers ranked at least one AI initiative in their top-5 organizational priorities — the highest rate recorded in this benchmark series.

Customer experience, revenue diversification, and technology modernization all lost ground as AI climbed +12 pts from Wave 1 to Wave 3 in its strategic importance. AI is increasingly absorbing B2B budget, attention, and, in many cases, overwhelming other strategic imperatives as the B2B world rapidly adjusts to this technology shift.

The question for 2026 is no longer whether a company is investing in AI. It’s whether its investment in AI is compounding to drive market advantage, or just accumulating on the P&L.

From a list of 17 strategic choices, 93% of B2B decision makers name AI as a top-5 strategic priority. That is a 10-point jump between Wave 2 and Wave 3 — a significant increase from an already elevated 81% Wave 1 baseline.

Prioritization is a zero-sum game. Not everything can be in the top 5. So as we approach the 100% benchmark, it begs a question: what priorities may be suffering as a result of the strategic focus on AI?

Customer Experience fell as a top-5 priority from Wave 2 to Wave 3 — the largest single-priority decline among the 17 choices offered. Companies appear to be turning inward as they absorb the effects of AI on the B2B world.

There is additional evidence to back up this theory. Today, B2B companies prioritize “use of AI tools by internal teams” and “building AI/ML models or product features” as top-5 priorities 83% (the #1 ranked choice) and 65% (the #2 ranked choice) of the time respectively. None of the other 15 choices come close — the 3rd-ranked choice, major market expansion, dropped 8 pts from Wave 2 to Wave 3 to 47%. We go deeper on the implications in Chapter 5: The GTM Efficiency Gap — spoiler: customers are so far seeing limited benefits of AI in their B2B experience.

For the first time in three waves, the share of technical decision makers building net-new AI-native products overtook those only enhancing existing products (down from 28% to 16%). Runners are 2× more likely than Walkers to focus on building new AI products.

The product-strategy mix and the strategic-priority data tell the same story: AI is no longer a feature being added to existing products — it is increasingly the product.

Less than half of those surveyed link their AI investment to hard metrics of revenue or cost savings. More striking: across 18 months and a near-doubling of AI adoption, the share of companies that can name a hard P&L return tied to their AI program hasn’t moved. This tension is explored in full in Chapter 6: AI Meet P&L.

We believe the strategic focus on AI will reward some companies and help them not only cross the agentic divide we discuss in Chapter 2, but can also create significant competitive advantage.

Since Wave 1, the Runner share — companies with the highest AI maturity in our data set — has grown from 1 in 8 to nearly 1 in 4. More companies are graduating to Runner status. Runners are organizations with extensive AI portfolios, integrated agentic workflows, and AI at roughly 30% of their IT budget. What Runners have built is explored in full in Chapter 3.