Seven in ten executive leaders say their organizations are seeing “significant” benefits from artificial intelligence — but only one in four frontline employees agree, according to a new global study from Lucidworks.
The gap widens further based on who had a say in AI decisions.
“At least two-thirds of leaders are disconnected from their staff’s ground-level AI experiences,” said Mike Sinoway, CEO of Lucidworks. “Stated satisfaction with AI increases dramatically as you travel up the org chart, and choice-supportive bias could be to blame here. Conscious or not, optimism from the C-suite might be leading organizations to see ROI where there really isn’t any yet.”
The fourth annual AI benchmark study, released June 16, also found that 84 per cent of organizations report measurable benefits from AI — yet just one per cent demonstrate advanced AI implementation in practice.
The perception gap
Among executives who identified as primary AI decision-makers, 91 per cent said AI has had “large” or “significant” net positive effects on their businesses. Among individual contributors who had no involvement in AI decisions, only 26 per cent reported the same.
Productivity gains were the most commonly cited benefit, with 66 per cent of respondents pointing to that as the leading advantage of AI adoption.
Despite those numbers, Lucidworks found that 70 per cent of organizations have not yet put in place more than half of the foundational infrastructure needed to run AI effectively.
“It seems unlikely that so many companies would experience real benefits from AI when so few are actually using it to a meaningful degree,” Sinoway said. “We’re seeing a sort of ‘placebo effect’ around AI operationalization.”
What the data actually show
Lucidworks used its own Market Assessment Agent — a tool that measures real-world AI implementation across thousands of companies — to compare what organizations say they are doing with what they are actually doing. The agent found shallow operational maturity, limited advanced capability adoption, significant gaps in foundational execution, and low orchestration maturity across the companies assessed.
The study also found that 89 per cent of respondents believe they are keeping pace with or outperforming competitors in AI maturity — a figure the report calls a statistical impossibility.
“Almost 90 per cent of companies claim that they’re either on par with or ahead of their competitors in AI implementation. Obviously, that math doesn’t compute,” Sinoway said. “Companies have gone from hyping AI technology to hyping benefits. One thing is clear, though: the execution gap is widening.”
Spending and investment trends
As AI spending stabilizes, organizations are shifting focus toward operational workflows and customer outcomes rather than novelty-driven deployments. Business-to-business (B2B) companies are outpacing business-to-consumer (B2C) companies in overall AI investment for the second consecutive year, after taking a wait-and-see approach in earlier years.
The average organization now uses 2.25 AI models, signalling a shift toward multi-model environments.
The AI Execution Gap: 2026 State of AI in Digital Experiences and Commerce is based on surveys of thousands of executives and employees worldwide. Lucidworks conducted the survey for the fourth consecutive year and supplemented responses with data from its Market Assessment Agent, which independently measures AI implementation across thousands of companies. The report was released June 16, 2026.
