In 2025, business leaders feared missing AI. In 2026, the fear has flipped - 65% of global CEOs now worry more about investing in the wrong AI than falling behind. Here's what that shift means for trades and allied health businesses.
For the past two years, the dominant fear around AI was simple: move fast or fall behind. Get in early, experiment, adopt or get left in the dust. That fear drove a wave of spending - on tools, platforms, subscriptions, consultants, and half-finished projects that never quite delivered.
In 2026, something has shifted. And if you run a trades or allied health business, this shift matters.
A new global survey of 900 CEOs across eight countries - conducted by research firm Harris Poll on behalf of Dataiku - found that the number one fear around AI is no longer falling behind. It’s investing in the wrong things.
65% of business leaders said they worry more about over-investing in AI amid vendor noise and no clear market leader than they do about under-investing. Let that sit for a moment. Most business leaders aren’t lying awake worrying they haven’t done enough AI. They’re worrying they’ve backed the wrong horse.
And 56% now openly admit that their competitors have deployed AI strategies they consider superior to their own.
Why the fear has changed
Two years ago, any AI was better than no AI. Speed was the advantage. If you adopted before your competitors, you gained ground.
That window has largely closed. The tools are now mainstream. Your competitors have probably tried something. The question is no longer “are you using AI?” It’s “is your AI actually working?”
This is why the fear has shifted from adoption to accountability. Leaders are now being judged not on whether they explored AI, but on whether their AI investments delivered measurable results.
The same research found that 80% of business leaders said their performance would be at risk if AI failed to deliver measurable gains by the end of 2026. And the primary way they’re now measuring AI success? Revenue growth - up from just 16% of leaders citing it as the key metric in 2025 to over 28% in 2026.
AI is no longer a tech experiment. It’s a revenue expectation.
What this means for your business
If you run a trades business - plumbing, electrical, building - or an allied health practice, the pressure playing out at the enterprise level is a preview of what’s coming to your market.
AI tools for small and medium businesses are proliferating just as fast. Every software vendor has bolted “AI” onto their product. Every platform has a new feature. Every week there’s a new tool promising to transform your workflow.
The risk isn’t missing AI. The risk is backing the wrong one - spending money on a tool that doesn’t fit your workflow, locking yourself into a vendor that doesn’t understand your industry, or running a half-implementation that creates more work than it saves.
That’s the new anxiety. And it’s legitimate.
The antidote to vendor risk
The answer isn’t to slow down or sit it out. Businesses that get AI working properly - even at a small scale - are gaining a real edge. The gap between those who get it right and those who don’t is widening.
The answer is to demand proof before commitment.
At GrokoryAI, we don’t ask you to take our word for it. We build something real inside your business in seven days. You see the output, the workflow, the results - before you’ve committed to anything long-term. If it’s not delivering what you need, we don’t lock you in.
That’s the model the current market demands: fast, practical, measurable, and yours to own.
The leaders who win the next phase of AI won’t be the ones who spent the most. They’ll be the ones who proved it worked first.
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Disclaimer: This article is general information and does not constitute financial, legal, or business advice. Statistics cited are sourced from the Dataiku/Harris Poll Global AI Confessions Report: CEO Edition 2026 (n=900 CEOs, companies with $500M+ revenue). Findings reflect enterprise sentiment and are applied here as directional context for SMB operators. Information current as at June 2026.
Gregory Hardiman is the founder of GrokoryAI. Based in Australia. Focused on practical AI systems for trades and allied health businesses.
