AI can drive more predictable and diversified revenue models

How are organisations moving AI into core operations to deliver efficiencies and drive innovation?

PwC’s 2026 CEO survey shows that despite widespread experimentation, just 17 per cent of Irish CEOs say that AI has delivered increased revenues in the past 12 months (Global: 29 per cent).

Less than a quarter (23 per cent) say that AI has delivered cost reductions in the past 12 months (Global: 26 per cent).

The survey points to a growing divide between companies piloting AI and those deploying it at scale. 

Global CEOs reporting both cost and revenue gains are two to three times more likely to say they have embedded AI extensively across their business.

How are organisations moving AI into core operations to deliver efficiencies and drive innovation?

PwC’s 2026 CEO survey shows that despite widespread experimentation, just 17 per cent of Irish CEOs say that AI has delivered increased revenues in the past 12 months (Global: 29 per cent).

Less than a quarter (23 per cent) say that AI has delivered cost reductions in the past 12 months (Global: 26 per cent).

The survey points to a growing divide between companies piloting AI and those deploying it at scale. 

Global CEOs reporting both cost and revenue gains are two to three times more likely to say they have embedded AI extensively across their business.

PwC Ireland’s 2025 AI agents survey highlights that the impact to date of AI agents on innovation and business transformation remains limited.

For example, just 16 per cent of Irish respondents are developing new agentic products and services.

The findings highlight a clear opportunity for Irish organisations to accelerate AI adoption and fully realise the reinvention and innovative potential of agentic AI. 

Organisations moving beyond experimentation are embedding AI within operations, enhancing infrastructure and governance, automating at scale, innovating their offerings with AI, and fostering a culture that leverages AI as a strategic enabler.

This holistic approach ensures AI is a core driver of competitive advantage rather than a set of isolated experiments or solely as an enabler of cost efficiency.

Separate PwC global analysis shows that companies applying AI widely to products, services, and customer experiences achieved nearly four percentage points higher profit margins than those that did not.

How is the technology enabling new revenue streams, subscription models and platform ecosystems? 

AI is enabling organisations to more rapidly tailor their products and services to the specific needs of individual customers.

Also and counter to some of the belief, the power of AI is not in removing person-to-person interaction from the sales cycle, but rather to use it to remove time-consuming friction from the process and ensuring that customers more readily get to interact with the right person who has an understanding of the specific needs and preferences of that customer.

However, PwC’s 2025 AI Agent survey shows that just 16 per cent of respondents said they use AI agents for innovative product and service development.

This suggests that Irish business leaders can leverage AI agents more aggressively in their innovative endeavours to future-proof their businesses. 

In summary, AI has the capacity to be a catalyst to reinvent traditional business models, products and services, workflows and relationships.

It can drive more predictable and diversified revenue models that are aligned with evolving customer expectation and personalised service.

What is the real impact of AI?

The real power of AI lies in using it to tackle the complex challenges rather than more simple use cases and reinventing how we do things — or doing different things. 

Agentic AI makes it a realistic ambition to tackle these more complex problems.

Organisations are increasingly seeing the need to do things differently, with nearly a third (29 per cent) of Irish respondents in PwC’s 2026 CEO survey saying that their operating model will be unrecognisable in two years’ time because of AI agents.

These benefits include increased productivity, cost savings, faster decision making and improved customer experience.

However, with just 9 per cent broad adoption of AI agents, Irish organisations still have a way to go to achieve the transformative benefits that are achievable by scaling agentic AI enterprise-wide. 

Agentic AI presents a clear opportunity to rethink how business and work gets done, but many organisations have yet to fully embrace the scale of reinvention required to remain competitive and resilient.

This article was first published on www.businessplus.ie