KPMG: 49% of Enterprises Scaled Back AI Agent Deployments Because Token Costs Outran the Benefits
KPMG's Global AI Pulse for Q2 2026 — 2,145 senior leaders across 20 countries at organizations above $50M revenue — found 49% had scaled back AI agent rollouts specifically because operating costs exceeded value, reported by Forbes on 2026-08-09. The mechanism named is the shift to usage-based token pricing colliding with agents whose multi-step tasks meter unpredictably; a related cut of the data shows 42% still cannot see where the money goes in real time. Notably this is not a retreat from AI overall: 79% still rank it a top investment priority with spend holding steady, making this a cost-visibility failure rather than a capability one — the r/LocalLLaMA thread (132 upvotes) read it as "bubble started to burst," which the survey internals do not support.
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