Research — Adoption
Research that measures AI adoption.
Tracks whether and how AI gets used — deployment, scaling, and reach. Every entry below is tagged adoption by an editor, not by the source itself, and carries its own source, publication date, and last-checked date.
Trace Cohen
Sep 2026
Value Add VC
A weekly investor newsletter with an Enterprise AI Adoption Dashboard. Investor-authored — low evidence level, closer to market commentary than primary research.
Ethan Mollick
Sep 2026
One Useful Thing
A Wharton professor's newsletter on how organizations use AI. Useful for adoption research commentary — cite the underlying studies Mollick covers, not the newsletter posts themselves, as this index does elsewhere for his LinkedIn commentary.
Quesma
Sep 2026
Inside the First Tokenomicon
A firsthand recap of the inaugural Tokenomicon in Amsterdam, covering the Big-T Notation, the Tokenomics Mind Map, and talks from UNICC and Infracost. Quesma sits on Tokenomics Foundation working groups — noted here as an affiliation, not a disqualifier.
Tokenomics Foundation
Sep 2026
State of Tokenomics
472 respondents across 11 industries, unveiled at the first Tokenomicon in Amsterdam. Proving ROI ranks as the single biggest reported challenge, ahead of attribution and pricing complexity. Defined cost ownership and router adoption both correlate with reported CFO-visible value, though the survey does not establish that either one causes it.
Open Future Forum
Sep 2026
Executive AI Leverage Report
Tracks who signs off on AI spend inside the organization, with the CFO's share of that decision rising. Built on small, room-based samples gathered at live sessions rather than a broad panel — read it as directional, not representative.
Fortune CFO Daily
Aug 2026
JPMorgan and Accenture Join the Tokenomics Foundation
An interview with the Tokenomics Foundation's J.R. Storment on the standardization timeline, following JPMorgan and Accenture joining as members. Storment expects near-monthly framework and value-metric releases through the end of the year — a claim about pace, not yet a delivered result.
FinOps Foundation
Jun 2026
FinOps X 2026 Day 2 Keynote
Covers FOCUS 1.4 and introduces a Crawl, Walk, Run maturity model for agentic AI spend — the practitioner-facing follow-on to Day 1's Tokenomics Foundation announcement.
FinOps Foundation
Jun 2026
FinOps X 2026 Day 1 Keynote: The Wild West of AI
The keynote where the Tokenomics Foundation initiative was introduced — converting energy and capital into AI tokens, then using those tokens efficiently to create value. A primary, dated snapshot of where the category's own standards body saw things heading, worth revisiting against how the year actually played out.
CIO Dive
Jun 2026
New Foundation Aims to Tackle AI Token Cost Management
Enterprise-IT framing of the Linux Foundation's intent-to-launch announcement for the Tokenomics Foundation, made at the FinOps X 2026 keynote. Trade-press coverage of the announcement itself, not of any measured result.
McKinsey
Feb 2026
The State of AI: Global Survey 2026
The broad annual read on enterprise deployment, scaling, and function-level adoption. Useful as a horizontal baseline, weak on financial outcome detail.
Google Cloud
Jan 2026
The ROI of Generative AI
A global survey of 2,500 senior leaders on time-to-value and revenue impact from generative AI deployments. Skews toward self-reported outcomes rather than audited financials.
Consero Global
Jan 2026
2026 CFO Report
102 finance leaders at private-equity- and venture-backed firms. Ranks AI use cases by payback period and names data readiness as the top blocker to realizing it. A services firm survey of its own client base — bias-flag it the way this index flags any vendor- or advisor-run sample.
FinOps Foundation
Jan 2026
State of FinOps 2026
The Foundation's annual benchmarking survey on FinOps maturity, now extending into AI spend management and governance. A useful adoption baseline to read against the AI-specific surveys elsewhere in this index, since it is measuring a practitioner population rather than a vendor-selected one.
BCG
Jan 2026
AI Radar 2026
2,360 executives across 16 markets. Projects AI spend to double in 2026, with 94% of respondents planning to keep investing even without immediate returns — a useful read on intent that says little about realized value.
PwC
Jan 2026
29th Global CEO Survey
4,454 CEOs across 95 countries. The strongest skeptic anchor in the set, and more current than Deloitte alone: more than half of respondents report neither a cost nor a revenue benefit from AI.
Wharton
Nov 2025
Gen AI in the Enterprise: From Hype to Human Capital
A companion analysis to Wharton's main adoption report, focused specifically on workforce and skills effects — including the less-comfortable finding that some employees report AI is making them feel de-skilled, not augmented.
Wharton / GBK Collective
Nov 2025
2025 AI Adoption Report
A third-year cross-sectional enterprise study with a formal ROI methodology, benchmarked across function and company size — more academically grounded than most vendor-run surveys.
BCG
Sep 2025
The Widening AI Value Gap
The actual source of the "5% future-built / 35% scaling / 60% minimal value" segmentation that gets cited around this category — often misattributed to BCG's later AI Radar report. 1,250 companies assessed against a 41-capability maturity framework, and most are stuck in the bottom tier.