By Angela Palumbo

Companies are adopting artificial intelligence more, but not at a rapid pace, research from UBS shows.

UBS analysts led by Karl Keirstead released data from their enterprise AI survey on Tuesday night. The firm surveyed information-technology executives at 130 organizations about their AI initiatives at the chip, cloud infrastructure, model, application software, data, and security layers.

"Just 17% of respondent organizations are in production at scale with their AI projects, a reminder for tech investors to remain sober about the likely 2026 revenue growth uplift from AI products," Keirstead wrote. He said that number was 14% in March 2025, 11% in October 2024, 10% in May 2024, and 6% in November 2023, so AI adoption is growing.

UBS asked respondents what the main challenges are with AI adoption at their companies and turned up a few reasons. The No. 1 challenge -- cited in 59% of responses -- was unclear return on investments. Keirstead calls that "concerning" and suggests that enterprises still haven't found a "killer use case" to justify material AI investments.

The uncertainty of when businesses will start to see a return on AI investments is something Wall Street has been closely watching. Tech companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI development, but AI capabilities are still in early stages. For enterprises to want to invest in AI software and other tech, they need to see proof that it is additive to their business by improving productivity and the bottom line.

Keirstead said that as AI adoption slowly increases there will be a few companies that will stand out as "key AI winners."

Nvidia is the large-language model training and inference platform of choice for enterprises, Keirstead said, noting that for model training, 79% of respondents flagged the use of at least one Nvidia GPU type.

He also said that Microsoft's M365 Copilot remains the top choice for general-purpose AI tools, while OpenAI's ChatGPT for business is right behind as the No. 2 choice. When it comes to creative tools for image and video, Alphabet's Google has led, with products like Veo and Nano Banana, followed by OpenAI and Adobe.

"Enterprise adoption across all technology shifts ramps slowly, far more slowly than consumer adoption, but the trend line is encouraging," Keirstead wrote.

Write to Angela Palumbo at angela.palumbo@dowjones.com

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December 17, 2025 14:39 ET (19:39 GMT)

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