PwC finds Saudi firms ahead on AI gains and short on returns

Saudi organisations report larger operational gains from artificial intelligence than their global peers on every dimension PwC measured, according to the Saudi findings from the firm's 2026 AI Performance Study, which also argues that those gains have not yet translated into financial returns. The headline comparisons are wide. More than half of Saudi respondents — 53 percent — report large or very large improvements from AI in how their organisations run, against 35 percent globally. More than half say they have used AI to identify emerging value pools, against 38 percent of global respondents. And 42 percent report significant improvement at the level of the business model itself, rather than in individual processes, against 30 percent worldwide. PwC's own framing of the result is that the Kingdom has moved past readiness into execution, and that the next test is value: turning adoption into returns that show up in financial performance and hold as a competitive advantage. The firm's global cut of the same study makes the point from the other direction, finding that around three-quarters of AI's economic gains are being captured by roughly 20 percent of companies — and that the companies capturing them are the ones using AI for growth rather than for cost reduction alone. Read together, those two findings are less flattering than the Saudi numbers look in isolation. A high share of respondents reporting large operational improvement is a survey of perception, not an audit of results. Self-reported AI benefit is one of the least reliable measures in enterprise technology, because the people answering are usually the same people who approved the spending. The gap PwC identifies — strong reported improvement, unproven financial return — is exactly what a market in an enthusiastic adoption phase looks like, and it is what the Kingdom's technology buyers will be judged on next. There is a structural reason to take the Saudi figures more seriously than a typical enthusiasm gap, though. Adoption in the Kingdom has been unusually top-down and unusually well capitalised, with government entities and large national champions deploying AI on a scale that smaller markets cannot fund. That produces genuine operating-model change rather than departmental pilots, because when a national utility, a ministry or an operator rewires a process, the whole process moves. It also concentrates risk: if the returns do not appear, they fail to appear at scale. The study lands in a week when the argument is being made loudly. PwC's global chief AI officer, Joe Atkinson, is among the speakers at DeepFest, the AI event co-located with LEAP, where SDAIA opened the programme with more than 100 speakers from 17 countries . Vendors on the floor have been making a version of the same case — that the constraint has shifted from capability to governance and measurement — including Liferay, which brought an AI governance argument to Riyadh . Separate measurement of Saudi service delivery has been rising in parallel, with digital experience maturity reported at 87 percent . What PwC has not published in the Saudi cut, at least in the material circulating this week, is the sample: how many organisations responded, in which sectors, and at what size. That matters for a market where a small number of very large entities account for a disproportionate share of technology spending, and where a survey weighted towards them would produce precisely these results. The number worth waiting for is the one the study says is missing. Not how many executives report improvement, but how many can point to it in a set of accounts. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.