For much of the past year, Wall Street and Silicon Valley have grappled with the same uncomfortable question: Will companies actually spend money to AIor is the hype simply outpacing the budgets?
A new CIO survey from RBC Capital suggests that this question may finally have an answer, and it’s a resounding yes.
RBC recently surveyed 117 IT professionals working at companies with annual revenues ranging from less than $250 million to more than $25 billion. 90% of respondents said their organization plans to spend more on AI in 2026.
“Overall, we emerged increasingly optimistic about the macro/fiscal stabilization taking shape in 2026 and encouraged by the pace of early adoption of GenAI,” RBC analysts wrote in a research note summarizing the results.
Not only are CIOs moving quickly into production with AI systems, but they are also setting aside dedicated budgets to fund this adoption.
A remarkable 90% of technology leaders said their organizations were creating new budgets specifically for generative AI and LLM projects, up from 85% the previous year. This suggests that AI is becoming additive rather than substitutive in business technology spending.
Even more telling: 60% of respondents said they were already in production with AI initiatives, an increase from 39% the previous year. 32% expect production to be in production within six months.
The move comes after months of skepticism from investors who questioned whether companies would convert pilot projects into actual spending. Survey data suggests that time has now arrived.
CIOs overwhelmingly cited AI as the top category for increased software spending next year, surpassing cybersecurity and IT service management. And in open-ended responses, executives repeatedly cited AI as their top investment area for 2026, often coupled with infrastructure upgrades and automation initiatives, according to the RBC survey.
Use cases extend beyond experimentation. Seventy-six percent of CIOs say their AI strategies now focus on both cost savings and revenue generation, a shift that reinforces AI’s transition from a novelty mandate to a competitive mandate.
Concerns remain – data privacy being at the top of the list – but these concerns are no longer slowing adoption. Instead, AI becomes the main force increasing IT budgets by 2026.
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