If you came into 2026 feeling behind because AI isn't baked into every workflow at your company yet, I've got some good news. You're on time, and the data backs that up a lot better than the LinkedIn feed does (admittedly a low bar).
What the numbers actually say
The US Census Bureau has been tracking AI use in its Business Trends and Outlook Survey, and between mid-December 2025 and early May 2026 the share of US businesses using AI hovered between 17% and 20%, so roughly one business in five.
Bigger companies are further along (about 37% of firms with 250 or more employees), but AI use among firms with fewer than 20 employees didn't change in any significant way over that stretch. If you run a small or mid-sized business, most of your peers are standing right where you are.
Moving fast hasn't meant winning
The other side of this is more interesting to me. S&P Global Market Intelligence surveyed more than 1,000 organizations in North America and Europe in 2025 and found that 42% had abandoned most of their AI initiatives before they reached production, up from 17% the year before. And MIT's NANDA initiative reported that about 95% of the organizations in its 2025 study were getting no measurable P&L return from generative AI.
I'm not quoting those to say AI doesn't work, because I use it every day and it's changed how I work. What those numbers tell me is that being first hasn't been much of an advantage for a lot of companies, and plenty of them spent real money learning lessons you can now learn for free by watching.
FOMO is the expensive part
Graeme Crouch, our SVP of Delivery, built the AI readiness framework a lot of this series leans on, and he has a line I keep repeating: fear of missing out is the single most expensive emotion in this whole conversation. It's what gets licenses bought before anyone knows what they're for, and it's what turns a sensible pilot into a "we have to show something by Q4" project.
I've felt that pressure myself more than once, and when you come with a built-in squirrel like I do, FOMO doesn't need much of an invitation. What helps me is asking what problem we're actually solving before anyone asks which tool to buy.
What on time looks like
Being on time still means starting, just with one process that's actually ready and a clear idea of what you'd measure, instead of ten pilots and a press release. The companies that come out of this well will be the ones that picked carefully, and there's no prize for picking first. Once you stop worrying about the clock, the better question is what return you're actually after, and that's a much more useful thing to lose sleep over.
These numbers move fast, so check them again before you quote them to anyone who signs checks. As of right now, though, nobody is behind.
