# The AI adoption honeymoon is over. It’s time to deliver on value

*Source: https://ketosoftware.com/blog-article/the-ai-adoption-honeymoon-is-over-its-time-to-deliver-on-value/*

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![Zishan Ali](https://ketosoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ali_zishan.png)

Zishan Ali   SPM Architect

Somewhere in the last eighteen months, the question boards ask about AI quietly changed from “are we using it yet?” to “Is it delivering tangible results?” The problem? Most AI programmes were built to answer the first question, not the second. 

### Built to start, but not to stop

Adoption was an easy metric to chase. Pilots are cheap, visible, and easy to announce. A dashboard showing “12 AI initiatives underway” looks like progress at a board meeting, regardless of what those initiatives were delivering. For a few years, that was enough. It isn’t anymore. 

Gartner’s research into this year’s CIO priorities makes the shift explicit. Agentic AI remains a top investment priority for well over half of technology leaders, but the framing has changed. With reliability and ROI being added to AI KPIs, the conversation has moved past “can we build this” to “can we defend this to the board, the regulator, and the balance sheet.” 

### The narrative is changing

The pressure on enterprise leaders is obvious: the era of funding AI experiments because they’re directionally promising is ending. Instead, they must answer a harder, more specific question: which initiatives are worth the next dollar, and which ones should have been stopped months ago. 

Most portfolios are not built to answer that. They’re built to start things. Almost none of them are built to stop things: there’s no formal process, no clear owner, and often no political appetite for admitting an initiative isn’t working. That asymmetry is where a lot of AI value is quietly leaking out of enterprise budgets right now. 

### Join us at Gartner IT Symposium

This is exactly the gap I will be unpacking at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo this November, in a session on how investment decisions get connected to strategy, and why the harder half of that discipline isn’t funding the next idea. It’s having the courage to stop the ones that aren’t working. If your organisation has more AI initiatives running than anyone can clearly justify, that session is worth the walk across the floor.

Click on the link below for more information on Keto at this years’ Gartner IT Symposium

[Keto at Gartner IT Symposium](https://ketosoftware.com/gartner-it-symposium-barcelona/)