1 in 4 S&P 500 Companies Can Now Prove AI Pays

A year ago, most large companies were running artificial intelligence (AI) pilots and calling it progress. Now they’re reporting numbers.

One in four S&P 500 companies reported least one quantifiable AI impact in the Q1 2026, up from 13% in the same period a year earlier. Finance ranked second by sector at 40%, nearly triple its 15% from 2025. Tech led at 42%.

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote in January that the debate about whether AI delivers had largely been settled by the end of 2025—not through argument, but through use. Enough organizations had crossed from experimentation to deployment that CEOs and CFOs were discussing AI on earnings calls. The story in 2026, Webster wrote, would belong to companies that had already put AI to work and could show what changed, not by those still debating whether it was real.

The numbers support that read. In Q4 2024, just 16% of North American companies identified as AI adopters cited a quantifiable business impact in their earnings disclosures. By Q4 2025, that share had reached 30%, according to Morgan Stanley Research. Analysts expect 74% to 90% of AI-related benefits over the next 12 to 24 months to come from cost efficiency rather than revenue growth.

From Pilots to Production

The speed of the transition caught many observers off guard. In August, 98% of chief product officers at billion-dollar companies said they were unwilling to grant autonomous agents any meaningful authority, according to PYMNTS Intelligence. By November, the share of firms merely considering AI for core operations had dropped from 52% to 30%. Active deployment reached 23%. Nearly 40% of enterprise product leaders had given autonomous agents real access to systems that run the business.

The fastest movement came outside technology. In goods and manufacturing, almost no companies had live deployments in August. Nearly one in five did by November, concentrated in supply chains, procurement and logistics. Services surged from 4% to 25% over the same period.

“Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI has emerged as a defining force across markets, reshaping how companies operate, invest and compete,” Morgan Stanley said.

Where the Readiness Gap Shows Up

The results don’t mean adoption is smooth. The harder problem, as enterprise AI moves to scale, is the company itself.

Seventy-one percent of senior technology executives said their own organization limits AI performance more than the technology does, according to PYMNTS Intelligence. Additionally, 63% cited data quality as the most common obstacle for faster adoption. Integration with existing systems ranked as the single biggest constraint when executives were asked to name just one barrier.

The confidence gap is sharper still. PYMNTS Intelligence found that 99% of enterprises expressed confident in their data governance, but only 15% said their data environments are mostly integrated across the company. AI has embedded most deeply in data and technology teams. Adoption in HR, strategy, risk and supply chain teams remain less widespread.

In Payments and Finance

For finance and payments executives, the sector data carries a specific signal. Finance’s jump from 15% to 40% of companies reporting quantifiable AI impact in a single year is the steepest climb of any non-tech sector tracked by Morgan Stanley. That rate of disclosure means finance teams are finding gains they can put numbers on: faster cycle times, reduced error rates in back-office processing or lower cost per transaction.

Morgan Stanley’s analysts expect 89% of AI adopters to see greater benefit from cost efficiency versus just 11% from revenue growth over the next 12 to 24 months. Companies building on that ratio are concentrating investment in workflow automation, back-office processes and operational cost reduction—workflows where ROI is easiest to measure—then using that data to justify broader deployment.

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