How Enterprise Leaders Are Turning AI Adoption Into Operating Advantage

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Large enterprises in financial services, healthcare and media are all investing in artificial intelligence, but they’re not using the technology the same way. PYMNTS Intelligence’s latest installment of “The Enterprise AI Benchmark Report” finds that while adoption is broad across all three sectors, the scale depends on each industry’s operating needs, data quality, systems and management structure.

Enterprise AI Takes Different Roads

AI Adoption Divide

Financial services and insurance have reached high AI adoption on 27 of 75 operational tasks, compared with 16 tasks in media and advertising and 10 tasks in healthcare. Use of the technology is widespread, but financial services has moved further from experimentation to routine use.

Revenue Protection

Sixty-five percent of financial services and insurance firms use the technology for revenue recognition and accounting close, the sector’s most adopted AI task. Financial firms are using the technology first in areas where results are structured, trackable and tied to revenue or risk.

Healthcare Relief

Sixty percent of healthcare firms use AI for customer service chatbots and virtual agents, the sector’s highest AI use case. Healthcare is using the technology to ease pressure on workers and operations before it scales into broader business processes.

AI Budget Growth

Eighty-five percent of financial services and insurance firms are increasing their AI budgets over the next 12 months, compared with 80% of media and advertising firms and 60% of healthcare firms. Spending is rising across sectors, but the reasons differ: productivity in financial services, pilots in healthcare and strategy in media.

Barrier Split

Thirty percent of financial services firms cite data quality as their top barrier, while 30% of healthcare firms cite system integration and 20% of media firms cite internal skills. The main AI hurdle is not the technology. It is the operating foundation needed to use it at scale.

Methodology

This Data Book is based on “Financial Services Pulls Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race,” the May 2026 edition of the PYMNTS Intelligence exclusive series, The Enterprise AI Benchmark. The report was based on a March 2026 PYMNTS Intelligence survey of 60 verified senior technology executives at U.S.-based enterprises with at least $1 billion in annual revenue. The sample was evenly split across financial services and insurance, healthcare and medical, and media services and advertising, with 20 executives per sector. All respondents were primary decision-makers or the most knowledgeable executives for AI strategy, adoption and operations.

About

PYMNTS Intelligence is a leading global data and analytics platform that uses proprietary data and methods to provide actionable insights on what’s now and what’s next in payments, commerce and the digital economy. Its team of data scientists include leading economists, econometricians, survey experts, financial analysts and marketing scientists with deep experience in the application of data to the issues that define the future of the digital transformation of the global economy. This multi-lingual team has conducted original data collection and analysis in more than three dozen global markets for some of the world’s leading publicly traded and privately held firms.

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