THE TECHNOLOGY INTERVIEW
nterprise AI adoption has reached 78 % globally, yet a troubling gap has emerged between implementation and value creation. More than 80 % of companies report no measurable impact on their bottom line from AI investments, while 42 % of executives acknowledge that deployment efforts are creating internal disruption rather than business benefits.
The performance divide is stark. Companies with comprehensive AI strategies achieve 80 % implementation success rates, compared to just 37 % for organisations taking piecemeal approaches.
2025: The year chatbots grew up Oliver Parker runs global AI sales for Google Cloud, which means he spends his days talking to executives who are either thrilled with their AI results or bewildered by them. He’ s watched as the technology evolved from research previews of chatbots into something far more capable.“ These AI systems started very much as chatbots over the last couple of years,” he explains.“ The agent-based capabilities are really around automating lots of new things versus question and then answer, which is how LLMs started.”
The difference matters more than it sounds. Early AI tools could answer questions or generate text, but they couldn’ t actually do anything useful with that information. Now they can take action, remember context from previous interactions and handle complex tasks that used to require human intervention.
26 October 2025