As we look back on 2025, one theme that emerges from our work helping over 100 clients with their AI adoption is that extracting real value from AI takes a sustained effort across the organization, and those investments are now starting to pay off.
In 2026, we anticipate that many firms will emerge from the pilot/experimentation AI phase and transition to an operational phase that includes multiple large-scale AI use cases in production, with demonstrable ROI in the form of either cost savings or new sources of revenue.
These firms will likely have gone through long periods of skills building, governance enhancements, pilot programs, model testing, and use case iteration, with many small victories and failures along the long road to figuring out how AI can deliver real value for their particular businesses.
That investment of time was needed to align business strategy with AI strategy and to find the right combination of tools, talent, workflows, pilot programs, training, and governance necessary to implement high-value/low risk AI use cases at scale.
These firms are now positioned to expand the scope of their more successful use cases, and to quickly find and implement new valuable use cases, which leads to a compounding and accelerating advantage loop.
In our experience, both at Debevoise and with our clients, AI success leads to more AI success, including increased buy-in from employees and management, better understanding of what AI tools can and cannot do, and more ideas for how to use AI to save time and money or deliver entirely new services to clients.
Through this process, employees develop their AI skills, improve existing use cases, and accelerate the timeline for moving new ones into production, creating even more organizational momentum. Those firms that are ahead now will find it relatively easy to stay ahead, especially if they can poach talent from the firms that have fallen behind.
For those companies that find themselves behind in AI adoption, it is certainly not too late to catch up. Indeed, the path to success is clearer now that it was a year ago, so it should take less time to reach successful adoption than it did in 2025, but those that are ahead are gaining momentum. So, for many of the companies that have largely been on the AI adoption sidelines, the time to get in the game is now.
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The cover art for this blog was generated by Gemini 3 (Nano Banana Pro).
