91% of professionals say their firm still falls short

What happened

As many as 91% of employees say their organization is falling short of reaching the value that AI can deliver, according to the 2026 Future of Professionals Report from global content and technology company Thomson Reuters.

" Roth said smart business leaders look for workable AI solutions to intractable challenges by giving professionals room to explore emerging technologies, without taking on too much risk. That was something she did at Thomson Reuters, where the firm took what she described as an open-minded approach to generative AI.

"If you had a cool tool and [were] in marketing, sales, or coding teams, and you wanted to try it, we would let you try it," she said. Roth said rather than go out with cost targets in mind, the business has encouraged people to test AI tools and see if they can find a better way of working. "We've said to people, 'Here are the tools.

Reimagine what you can do,'" she said. "Now, obviously, some have done better than others, and some have needed more nudging and help than others. But we have encouraged people to think about what these tools can do in today's world.

" A crucial element of this strategy, Roth suggested, is being clear about which tools do and do not provide benefits, and in the latter case, bringing explorations to a halt. "Early on, we'd try anything for about six weeks. You could get a license to pretty much anything you wanted, and have your team play with it, depending on what kind of function you were in," she said.

"We'd test for the results, and if the results were good, we'd roll it out in other teams. And if the results weren't good, we'd kill it, and we'd move on. " Roth said the companies pulling ahead in generative and agentic AI are those that turn explorations into production-level services, while the laggards do not.

Why it matters

The research, based on a global survey of 1,800 professionals from multiple sectors, shows a widening gap between AI ambition and reality, which is becoming an increasingly significant issue, Kirsty Roth, chief operations officer at Thomson Reuters, told ZDNET. Eighteen months ago, employees were eager to experiment with AI, and their bosses were keen to support these explorations. Today, it's another story.

Professionals are burning through tokens as they use AI, with their bosses concerned about the upward trajectory of their IT bills. With MIT research suggesting that 95% of AI projects fail to deliver value, it's unsurprising that companies are getting cold feet. "People are starting to work out [that] these technologies cost lots of money, and they don't necessarily see the value from them yet," said Roth.

'" New emerging technologies, from agentic AI models to deep research tools, will continue to enter the business. As Boomi CEO Steve Lucas told ZDNET recently, the general state of play in AI is hyper-fragmented and hyper-fractured.

"Professionals now recognize a bunch of terms -- frontier models, private models, domain models, open-weight models, agentic frameworks, agentic harnesses, and agentic loops -- that didn't exist a few years ago, never mind a few months ago," he said.

Roth, who considered her firm's research and drew on her personal experiences, suggested businesses and their professionals who deliver value from AI focus on two areas: well-grounded explorations and solid production use cases. Professionals responding to the research were clear on what their AI tools must do: safeguard confidential data (96%), ground outputs in authoritative content (94%), and produce explainable and defensible reasoning (90%).

However, two in five professionals (41%) who use AI at work said they don't have access to high-quality tools. Even when an AI strategy exists, execution often lags, according to the research. Just over a third (35%) of professionals in firms with a named AI strategy say the approach isn't visible in their day-to-day work.

Roth said one explanation is what she called "tool blast," where organizations push a broad selection of AI services to staff without a clear business outcome in mind. "I've heard people say, 'I've been given all these things. ' Too many firms aren't clear on what tools people should use.

What to watch

"I think the successful firms are now starting to say, 'OK, we have chosen, and we are going to use this tool, and therefore we're all going to change our business process to operate in this new way,' and then you start to see some improvements and savings," she said, before adding an important caveat.

"However, it still feels like the majority of firms are in the playground, if I can put it like that. " At Thomson Reuters, the specific use cases focus on five key areas: engineering, customer support and success, marketing, editorial and content operations, and core technology operations. "Of course, we'd love to make everyone's job better, and we will do our best," she said.