Businesses of all shapes and sizes are adopting AI to improve productivity and efficiency, but where they should be seeing improvements from this strategy, instead they’re seeing rising token costs, struggles with integrating tools, and more security risks.
As with all new technologies, adoption comes first and the procedures and governance are a few steps behind. Experiments are taking place in almost every industry, and the lessons learned will help guide other businesses into successful adoption and AI maturity.
But employees fear replacement and sometimes spend more time questioning the results of their AI assisted work. In the worst circumstances more work is created in trying to ensure employees trust the technology, and solving the new, unseen challenges that come with adapting an AI strategy.
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AI costs and challenges in the road ahead
Rising token costs are one of the biggest challenges businesses face. Without clear ways to measure how token costs reflect performance, it’s very difficult to assess if AI spend is actually offering any performance benefits. This is especially true when new, more powerful models are being released – and staying ahead of the competition means the accompanying, ever-increasing costs is the price of doing business.
But while employees may have just finished their training, or setting up a new workflow for one AI model, introducing the next can increase complexity and harm any new productivity gains. There is therefore a balance to be struck between AI integration, its associated costs, and the productivity gains employees see.
Rampant spending and reckless adoption can turn an AI strategy from a business-boosting asset into a stress-inducing, trust-eroding liability.
Ruth Patterson, Managing Director, HP, UK & Ireland says that the businesses seeing the most success during this technological revolution aren’t necessarily integrating it at every turn. Instead, they’re “applying it to practical workflows in a way that protects data and delivers real results.”
I spoke to Patterson to understand the challenges businesses face in delivering an AI strategy that shows real results, and how organisations can tackle the challenges that come with adoption AI.
- How are enterprise attitudes towards AI token use changing in 2026?
Businesses are waking up to a simple but overlooked truth about AI: the more they use, the more it costs. As AI has become part of everyday work, the financial cost of millions of interactions, charged at a token level, has become much more visible – and not just to the IT department.
Finance leaders are watching token usage fill a sizeable chunk of their balance sheets, rightly prompting much closer scrutiny of where workloads are processed and whether every task needs to be sent to the cloud.
As the conversation moves from AI experimentation to value, leaders must now focus on building an AI strategy that’s both commercially sustainable and operationally efficient. That means moving away from AI for AI’s sake to a more tailored approach that balances cost, security and performance.
- What are businesses prioritising as they move beyond initial AI experimentation? Where have businesses seen the greatest gains?
The biggest gains so far have come from AI taking repetitive tasks off people’s desks. You will have heard this said a lot, but the benefits are real. Whether it’s summarising meetings, drafting documents, searching internal knowledge or helping employees find information more quickly, AI really is giving people back time to focus on work that requires judgement and creativity. Employees increasingly recognise that the future of the workplace is AI-enabled, whereby their own skills augmented by digital solutions. To succeed, organisations must offer access to the right technology and create environments where people feel empowered to experiment with AI.
However, as more organisations begin to move beyond this experimentation phase, they are starting to become much more disciplined. They’re asking whether AI is secure, whether employees are using approved tools and whether the technology is genuinely improving productivity rather than simply adding another application to the estate.
The businesses making the fastest progress in this environment aren’t necessarily using the most AI. They’re the ones applying it to practical workflows in a way that protects data and delivers real results.
- What are the biggest challenges organisations face when deploying AI at scale?
Organisations must juggle several competing priorities as they scale deployment: how to protect sensitive data, manage operational costs, maintain performance and ensure employees trust the technology they’re using.
The trust question is particularly important as AI moves further into everyday use. Employees need confidence that the tools are reliable and approved, while organisations need confidence that data is protected and whether the cost model is right.
Getting IT infrastructure tuned correctly is key to making this work at scale. One of the most important decisions that organisations need to make is which AI workloads belong in the cloud, and which make more sense running on the device. That is ultimately a business decision – as opposed to purely a technology or IT decision – because it affects performance, cost and security.
- How does on-device AI slot into an organisation’s overall AI strategy?
I don’t see cloud AI and on-device AI as competing approaches – I see them as complementary. Cloud services will remain essential for large-scale models and complex reasoning. But not every AI task needs to leave the device.
For everyday activities like summarisation, transcription or content creation, running AI locally can reduce dependence on cloud infrastructure and give organisations greater control over sensitive information. AI only creates value when it becomes part of everyday workflows. By adopting on-device AI-solutions, employees can reduce latency and increase productivity with the peace of mind that their data is secure. This offers an easy route-in for employees beginning to implement AI into their day-to-day workflows.
The right approach to enterprise AI strategy is pretty simple: place workloads where they make the most sense. Because once the right balance between cloud and local AI is found, organisations will find the sweet spot between cost, performance and security.
- How are business leaders evaluating the success of AI investments around productivity?
The conversation has moved beyond adoption metrics. Now leaders want to understand whether AI is creating measurable improvements in business performance. They’re looking at time saved, faster decision-making, improvements to workflow efficiency and whether employees can spend more time on higher-value work.
Technology leaders are also beginning to examine the broader economics of AI. Productivity gains need to be considered alongside operational expenditure, infrastructure requirements and long-term scalability.
Ultimately, AI should reduce friction. If employees can complete work more efficiently while organisations maintain control over cost and governance, that’s where the real return on investment begins to emerge.
AI-enabled digital solutions now offer benefits such as persona-based device optimisation or integrated sentiment analysis to measure employee satisfaction with digital tools. These innovations truly redefine experience management and facilitate higher employee satisfaction and productivity. It also enables leaders to stay closer to their employees and gauge whether AI is improving their experience or simply adding another layer of complexity.
- How do you expect enterprise AI infrastructure to evolve over the next few years?
We will continue to see significant investment in AI infrastructure. But the conversation needs to go beyond capacity, because capacity doesn’t create business value alone.
The next phase will be about ensuring infrastructure enables AI workloads to run where they are most effective. That means treating the endpoint as part of the AI infrastructure and using it to process selected tasks locally, alongside cloud services and edge computing. At the same time, we can expect to see greater emphasis put on AI infrastructure that supports governance, security and efficiency alongside raw compute capacity.
Together, these infrastructure shifts will start to deliver the practical value that employees and businesses expect from AI but aren’t currently seeing.
- What trends are you watching most closely in enterprise AI right now?
Three stand out for me:
First, the move towards hybrid AI architectures. Organisations are becoming much more deliberate about deciding which workloads should run in the cloud and which belong on the device.
Second, the growing focus on the economics of AI. As adoption scales, businesses are paying much closer attention to operational expenditure, infrastructure efficiency and the total cost of AI deployment.
Finally, we’re seeing the role of the endpoint evolve. For years, the PC has been framed as an access device only. Today, it has become an intelligent computing platform, capable of running AI workloads securely and efficiently.
Businesses don’t need a big AI budget to get all three right. They just need to spend time working out, task by task, where intelligence really belongs.
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