Global AI Spending and Budgeting in 2026: What Experts are Predicting

How in the world are unified teams of CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs to budget for AI marketing in 2026?

We predict it will come from an experimental portion of the budget, but a sizable one at that.

Consulting firms like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG have shared that up to 40% of bookings in 2024 and 2025 have been for AI consulting. It’s likely that trend will continue into the new year.

We’ve pulled some select stats and predictions on 2026 AI budgeting across the spectrum.

Macro View: Global AI Spending will Increase About 37% in 2026 from 1.5 to 2 Trillion

At the macro level, AI spending will not increase as much in 2026 as it did in 2025 (37% vs 50%) but it will be a record year in total spending. The question remains if capex is frontloaded and we’ll start to hit the top of the s-curve in AI infrastructure and data center buildout, or if the party’s just getting started.

With numbers so large, it’s hard to know exactly how to put them into context. Effectively this spend level reflects 2% of global GDP which is huge.

Internal Corporate AI Investment will be Massive in 2026

According to Pitchbook’s James Ulan, AI projects have evolved from a toy in 2023 to real implementation in 2025. James predicts that 2026 will heat up even more with a significant increase in AI budgets.

CFOs will Expect ROI from AI Investments in 2026

At present, we’re a full three years after the release of ChatGPT. Most of us still have jobs and unemployment has not jumped. Despite Amazon’s big 10% cuts of white collar workers, not many are pointing to a full-blown unemployment catastrophe, three years in.

According to Jim Larrison, 2026 will be the year that CFOs want to see clear ROI.

Everybody’s Got a Budget for Agentic AI in 2026

2025 was called the year of AI agents, but what we’ve seen is that it’s been a year of figuring out how to plan for AI agents. Individuals and startups are moving fast, but we’ve yet to see clear in-your-face reports of larger companies and enterprises rolling these out at scale with excellent case studies.

That being said, boards are approving and carving out budgets for agenctic AI, seeing the writing on the wall that they have to figure it out.