America's CEOs are spending big on AI, new KPMG survey finds

There's a new CEO outlook survey out Thursday morning from the audit, tax, and advisory firm KPMG. And no surprise: Artificial intelligence is among the issues top of mind.

For more, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams was recently joined by Tim Walsh, chair and CEO of KPMG U.S. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: You all surveyed 400 CEOs of large companies for this survey. How big of a deal was AI in this year's results?

Tim Walsh: Well, as you'd expect, it is very, very prominent in the results, and it shows up in a couple of different areas for sure. But it's around innovation. It's certainly around return on investment, it's around governance in the boardroom, and then certainly around cybersecurity risk.

Adams: Four out of five of the CEOs in your survey said they recognize that AI will change company business models. What are they anticipating?

Walsh: Well, they're anticipating a number of different things. One is how they actually run their businesses, for sure — optimizing processes, cleaning up data, and then of course embedding AI technologies to help them be more effective and efficient. But it's also focused on how they bring product to market, regardless of what product that might be. It's getting to innovation faster, and of course, it's about revising and changing and updating those processes in terms of how you transform a business and how you do that more quickly.

Adams: One interesting data point in your survey was that CEOs say they plan to continue investing in AI, but only 9% report that current AI models have actually been transformational in their organization. How do you sort of reconcile that gap between what they're spending on AI and actually what they're getting in terms of performance?

Walsh: I mean, if you look back 12 months ago, you would have seen companies potentially and/or investors expecting this sort of immediate return on investment, but what we have learned is it's much more complex than that. I mean, AI requires companies to really revise how they've done things in the past, and many companies are decades, if not more, old in terms of the processes that have been in place. But it's not just that. I mean, AI requires clean data, so data needs to be reviewed, revised, and optimized, and then the AI can be engineered into the processes. So these things are not overnight; they do take time. But I will tell you that I have not met a CEO that doesn't feel confident that over time the technology will help them improve their businesses.

Adams: Do you find that this new world of AI that we're in is changing what it means to be a CEO?

Walsh: That's an interesting question for sure. CEOs have been managing through all sorts of dynamic environments for many years, but this, I would say, is probably the fastest-moving as it relates to technology than we have perhaps ever seen, so the answer to that is yes, but I would also say, I mean, it's not just technology. The dynamic environment out there is incredible. It's technology, technology advancement, but it's also geopolitical, geo-economic risk that CEOs are facing. And you know, what I do hear constantly — and I know for my own business — is that the ability to move quickly, the ability to be more agile, is at the forefront of CEOs as they're thinking about how to manage their businesses.