AI is beginning to deliver measurable returns for a growing group of businesses. PwC’s inaugural CEO Survey Mid-Year Snapshot found that 39% of chief executives now say AI has either increased revenue, reduced costs, or achieved both. That marks a notable change from eight months earlier, when most CEOs reported seeing little to no meaningful financial benefit from the technology.

PwC scores companies on techno-resilience, a single measure combining long-term thinking, resilience capability and strong AI foundations. High scorers are 74% more likely to report AI success, at 55% against 32%, and 66% more likely to hold strong confidence in future revenue growth, at 48% against 29%.

The survey covers 351 chief executives across 59 countries and 27 industries. Every respondent had already answered PwC’s 29th Annual Global CEO Survey, which allows the mid-year study to track how the same leaders have fared over six to eight months instead of comparing one sample against another.

The pilots are over

January’s full survey described a technology still waiting to prove itself, as fewer than a quarter of leaders said AI was applied widely across core activities, and most reported no real revenue gain or cost reduction over the previous year. Six months later, nearly four in ten are booking a benefit, and nothing in the intervening period suggests the models suddenly improved. What changed is that work moved out of the sandbox and into the operating business.

More than half of chief executives, 51%, saw the financial impact of AI change over eight months, which is a remarkable amount of churn for a period that short. A company sitting on nothing in January could plausibly be reporting returns by December. The counterweight is that 16% went the other way or stayed negative, so spending remains a poor substitute for execution.

Techno-resilience may sounds abstract, but it is a useful measure because each of its three parts can be built. Long-term thinking, resilience capability and solid AI foundations cover data quality, governance, internal skills and the willingness to fund work that pays back over years. None of it depends on sector, scale or luck.

Companies that put the groundwork in first are now reporting revenue and cost gains, and the 55% success rate among high scorers against 32% among the rest gives a sense of the difference that preparation makes. Investment made early is what allows a company to move quickly once a use case proves itself.

Preparation pays off

The most common use of AI this year is offensive, which cuts against the assumption that the technology is mainly a cost-cutting exercise. Almost four in ten leaders, 38%, have used it to identify new business opportunities created by disruption. PwC tested two other resilience applications alongside it, anticipating the effects of global shocks and generating recommended responses, and opportunity spotting beat both.

Disrupted markets leave gaps, in supplier relationships, in customer segments, in pricing that competitors have not had time to reset. Aiming the technology at commercial questions is producing more visible value than aiming it at risk registers, and the 39% reporting financial gains suggests the two findings are connected.

Headline confidence has barely moved, and taken alone it says almost nothing useful. Some 42% of chief executives are very or extremely confident about revenue growth over the next 12 months, against 39% eight months earlier, rising to 51% on a three-year view. Underneath, 33% report growing confidence and 26% report the opposite, so the flat average is two populations moving in opposite directions and cancelling each other out.

Split the same sample by techno-resilience and the picture sharpens considerably: 48% confident among high scorers against 29% among the rest. Benchmarking against the global average, in other words, tells a company very little about the group it actually competes with. One further note for anyone comparing PwC’s publications, the 39% baseline covers only the 351 leaders who answered both surveys, and sits above the 30% recorded across the full sample of 4,454 in January.

“CEOs are adapting to an environment where disruption has become the new normal. The business landscape is being reshaped by powerful structural forces, from technology and geopolitics to talent and infrastructure. The organizations that can take a longer-term view, strengthen resilience and invest in AI capabilities are better positioned for future growth.”

Mohamed Kande Global Chairman PwC

Gains of this kind fund the next round of them. A company earning from AI can pay for the following deployment out of the returns, and each project lands faster because the data, the governance and the skills are already in place. The cheerful conclusion buried in the data is that every deciding factor is a management choice, which means the gap now opening up is one any company can still choose which side of to be on.