The Agentic Gap: Vendors Sprint, Enterprises Crawl

Geopolitical dislocations are ripping through the stock market and are filtering down to IT budgets in the form of increased uncertainty. It seems that every quarter of budget optimism is followed with some external event that causes organizations to tighten their belts. Specifically, we’ve seen the increased momentum in January CIO sentiment on spending, pull back as war, oil prices, the threat of inflation and even the prospect of Fed tightening now loom larger. While big tech players continue to spend massively on CAPEX, and the genuine enthusiasm from this month’s Nvidia GTC and RSAC events is still being felt, mainstream enterprises are once again expressing caution in their spending intentions. In addition to economic and world affairs, AI success still eludes most mainstream organizations. Our observation is the tech industry is in the third inning of the AI wave, which started in earnest mid last decade with Deep Mind and other significant research milestones that led to the ChatGPT and subsequent moments like Claude Code and OpenClaw. Yet organizations are still in the first inning. The data suggests that while virtually all firms are leaning into AI, those realizing ROI at scale remain the minority. While leading thinkers like Jensen Huang advise not focusing on ROI and letting innovation flourish irrespective of hard dollar returns, the reality is in the land of enterprise customers, tangible returns and risk management remain key governors of spending.