Gartner: 55% of Supply Chain Leaders Still Can't Show Their AI Spend Is Paying Off

Sixty-seven percent of supply chain digital investment is now going to AI. Fifty-five percent of chief supply chain officers say they still can’t tell whether it’s paying off. That’s the headline from a new Gartner survey — two studies, actually: one covering 394 supply chain professionals at organizations with at least $250 million in annual revenue, fielded November 2025 through February 2026, tracking where digital budgets go; the second surveying 135 senior supply chain leaders from January through April 2026 to catalog AI use cases and test whether ROI claims hold up.

Gartner’s fix isn’t more AI — it’s tighter change management. The firm recommends CSCOs adopt what it calls a “rightsized” change-management strategy: one that explicitly ties execution to AI strategy, supply chain strategy, and the broader enterprise plan, so change-management resources chase outcomes instead of scattering across individual pilots.

The gap isn’t unique to supply chain. Outreach’s AI Maturity Model, built with IDC, sorts revenue organizations into four stages — Traditional, Connected, Consolidated, AI-Efficient — precisely because so many organizations can’t place themselves on that spectrum. IDC research manager Michelle Morgan put it plainly: sales organizations are “moving beyond experimentation into operational scaling but often lack a framework to benchmark where they stand.” Swap “sales” for “supply chain” and the sentence still holds.

For any organization sitting on AI spend it can’t yet defend, the lesson from both surveys is the same: proving ROI is a change-management problem before it’s a technology problem. A maturity framework — Gartner’s rightsized version or Outreach’s four stages — gives leadership a way to answer “where are we, actually” before the board asks why the AI budget doubled and the numbers didn’t move.