FII Institute Report Warns of Widening AI Gap as Enterprise Spend Nears $400B

The Future Investment Initiative Institute has published a report on turning artificial intelligence spending into measurable results. An estimate from market research firm IDC, cited in it, puts global enterprise AI spending at $400 billion in 2026.

“Transforming Business: AI in the Enterprise” names workflow redesign, workforce development and responsible governance as the conditions for lasting value. McKinsey research cited in the report puts AI use at 88% of organizations, against 78% in 2024. Some 62% are experimenting with AI agents, and 23% are scaling agentic AI in a function.

Transforming Business: AI in the Enterprise

Deloitte research cited in the report found data privacy and security the most-cited AI risk, named by 73% of respondents, ahead of legal, intellectual property and regulatory compliance concerns at 50%.

Maha Bint Mishari Al Saud, the institute's CEO, writes that the distance between companies leading on AI and those lagging behind keeps growing, and that late movers will find it hard to close. She calls AI sovereignty a rising priority, pointing to the institute's FII PRIORITY Compass survey. In it, 87% of citizens worldwide wanted a global framework for regulating AI, and 58% of respondents in the Global South expected AI to create more jobs than it destroys, against 35% in the Global North.

The institute's flagship summit in Saudi Arabia takes place each October. This year's Riyadh edition is the tenth.

Saudi outlook

Visa research among Saudi business leaders found 63% expect agentic commerce to disrupt their industry within two years, 43.3% are evaluating AI-assisted purchasing and 20% are developing pilots.

HUMAIN One, the agentic platform from PIF-owned Saudi AI company HUMAIN, is named alongside Salesforce Agentforce and Microsoft Autogen as a leading agentic workflow system — the layer that plans, executes and coordinates multistep work across enterprise systems. The institute's own government-facing agentic tool, SAGE, was announced at its FII9 conference in October 2025.

Global private AI investment reached $344.6 billion in 2025, up 127.5% year on year, on Stanford AI Index figures cited in the report. Saudi Arabia accounted for $2 billion of it, against $258.9 billion in the US, $12.4 billion in China and $5.9 billion in the UK.

Partner playbooks

Brookfield has identified more than 800 AI use cases across its portfolio. The Canadian firm, which raised about $2 billion in July for a Middle East private equity fund anchored by PIF, staffs an AI Value Creation Office with more than 30 people. In customer operations it reports a 40% reduction in hiring costs per full-time equivalent and a fivefold increase in hiring speed. “The biggest lesson is that the gap between having an idea and getting it into production is where most companies lose momentum,” the firm said.

JD.com has applied AI across more than 3,000 scenarios in retail, logistics, healthcare, industrial supply chains and food delivery. Its JINGDONG Industrials business ran more than 70 AI agents across its value chain in the first half of 2026, according to CEO Sandy Xu. “AI often creates the greatest value not where there is the most information, but where information can ultimately be translated into decisions and actions,” she said.

Visa has several hundred AI models in production behind more than 100 products and has spent over $13 billion on technology in five years. Trust in AI-driven commerce will be tested at the point of payment, it said, describing Visa Intelligent Commerce as setting spending limits, approval thresholds and permission layers that define what an agent may execute.

Gulf voices

Rayan Fayez, deputy CEO of NEOM, said at an institute event in Miami that AI in the Saudi project is a core decision-making layer rather than a support function, directing where electrons flow most efficiently through energy and water systems. Mohamed Farouk, vice chairman and group CEO of ADES Holding, said at the same event that using AI to optimize rig energy use, including switching from engines to battery systems under certain loads, has cut emissions by nearly 20%.

ADES Holding ranked 74th on a 2026 ranking of the region's 100 most valuable companies, and HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin placed fourth among the Middle East's top tech CEOs on a 2026 list.