How AI Is Driving Revenue, Cutting Costs and Boosting Productivity for Every Industry in 2026

AI is everywhere and accelerating everything - becoming essential infrastructure to create the intelligence that will advance every industry.

That's why companies are increasingly focusing on the technology's return on investment (ROI), as well as how to best apply AI to their own use cases.

NVIDIA's annual State of AI reports show how AI is being adopted across industries, what it's being used for and how companies are achieving ROI, as well as their challenges and goals with the technology.

This year's reports garnered over 3,200 responses from around the world, providing a pulse check on the state of AI in financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG), healthcare and life sciences, telecommunications and manufacturing.

One takeaway is clear: The state of AI is strong. AI adoption is continuing to rise. Companies are building and deploying specialized AI programs with open source tools to tackle their specific challenges. Across every industry, AI is helping increase annual revenue and drive down annual costs while boosting productivity.

Read about the broad themes from this year's reports:

Growing enterprise AI adoption

AI drives productivity gains across every industry

AI increases annual revenue and drives down costs

The rise of agentic AI

Open source drives AI strategy

AI success leads to growing investment

The biggest challenges to AI adoption: lack of AI experts

Enterprise AI Adoption Matures Enterprise AI is continuing to scale.

Companies are moving from AI pilots and assessment to scaled deployment. In nearly every industry survey, the percentage of respondents who said their organizations are actively using AI increased, while the percentage of respondents who said they're in the assessment phase declined.

Overall, 64% of respondents to the surveys said their organizations are actively using AI in their operations. A little over a quarter (28%) said they're still in the assessment phase, while 8% said they're not using AI and have no plans to start.

North America leads in AI adoption, with 70% actively using the technology, 27% assessing AI projects and just 3% who said they're not using AI. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents in the EMEA region report they're actively using AI. AI adoption in the APAC region registers at 63%, with a higher percentage (15%) saying they're not using AI.

A distinct throughline was clear across all surveys: Larger companies (with more than 1,000 employees) demonstrate broader adoption, deploy more use cases and report greater ROI. More than three-quarters (76%) of respondents from large companies report active AI usage, with just 2% saying they don't use AI at all. These trends can be attributed to the fact that large companies have more capital to invest in AI infrastructure, data scientists and experts, leading executives to drive projects from pilot to production on highly specific and impactful use cases.

The financial services industry churns massive amounts of text, numbers, documents and analysis. Nasdaq, one of the world's premier stock exchanges and leading financial technology platforms, has built an AI platform to optimize its internal operations and enhance its external products, helping improve functionality and user experience while streamlining internal work processes.

At Nasdaq, we are a technology platform company, and AI has the ability for us to unite all the different businesses and products, said Michael O'Rourke, senior vice president and head of AI and emerging technology at Nasdaq. AI will help bring together data from all our businesses and technologies, and help us build better products and services.

Read more in this year's State of AI in Financial Services report.

AI Is Boosting Productivity This year's surveys revealed that the top three AI goals are creating operational efficiencies (34%), improving employee productivity (33%) and opening new business opportunities and revenue streams (23%).

More than half of respondents (53%) said improved employee productivity was one of the biggest impacts AI had on business operations, from speeding financial market analysis to boosting efficiency on factory floors with digital twins.

For example, in this year's NVIDIA State of AI in Telecommunications report, 99% of respondents said AI helped improve employee productivity, with a quarter saying the technology provided a major or significant improvement.

Productivity increases have cascading effects throughout the business. For instance, 42% of overall respondents said AI created operational efficiencies, and 34% said the technology helped open up new business and revenue opportunities.

Manufacturing is one such industry benefiting from AI integration.

Siemens, for example, is helping manufacturers realize productivity gains and optimize workflows by integrating AI into its tools and applications.

PepsiCo is an early adopter, working with Siemens and NVIDIA to convert selected U.S. manufacturing and warehouse facilities into high fidelity 3D digital twins that simulate end to end plant operations and supply chains. Using Siemens' Digital Twin Composer, PepsiCo can recreate every machine, conveyor, pallet route and operator path with physics level accuracy, enabling AI agents to simulate and refine system changes and identify up to 90% of potential issues before any physical modifications occur.

This has already delivered a 20% increase in throughput on initial deployments, driven faster design cycles with nearly 100% design validation and produced 10-15% reductions in capital expenditure.

AI Is Boosting Revenue and Reducing Costs A major concern surrounding AI adoption is whether investment in the technology actually results in revenue gains, decreased costs, increased productivity and enterprise

LINK:	https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/state-of-ai-report-2026/...
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