CEO Survey: Diving into AI despite an uncertain regulatory environment

The adoption of artificial intelligence continues to advance at a rapid clip. A majority of CEOs polled in our latest survey report that they’ve already embedded the technology into their core offerings and are gearing up for sizable AI budget expansions in 2025. The momentum persists despite lingering issues that include data privacy concerns, regulatory uncertainty, and the looming question of how AI will reshape the workforce. 

Here’s a closer look at how CEOs are navigating the opportunities and challenges of an AI-driven future as they look ahead. Explore the full survey results, segmented by region, sector, and stage on Sōzō Pulse.

As AI adoption continues to accelerate, 55% of CEOs said they’ve incorporated the technology into their core product or service offerings. An even larger number said they’re using AI internally: 71% in operations and 58% in customer engagement/experience. CEOs are also using AI in sales and business development (31%). 

“AI is no longer a future-facing initiative — it’s a core driver of product and business strategy,” says Alex Clavel, CEO of SoftBank Vision Funds. “Leaders are moving rapidly to integrate AI into everything from core offerings to operations. It has become an imperative for leaders seeking to maintain a competitive edge in rapidly evolving markets.”

As adoption deepens, it’s little wonder that investments in AI are growing rapidly. Three-quarters of CEOs said their spending on AI increased in 2024. At 30% of companies, it more than doubled, and at 16% it more than tripled. That rapid growth is expected to continue: 29% of CEOs said they expected their AI investments to more than double in 2025, and 14% to more than triple. 

Olaf J. Groth of the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business noted that a few key trends are driving the increased spending and widespread adoption of AI. The first is the alignment of AI initiatives with overarching business strategies, so that they contribute to core organizational goals. Equally important is what Groth calls “thoughtful experimentation with an ROI focus,” which is enabling companies to experiment with AI, but ensures that those AI experiments ultimately lead to higher ROI. Finally, companies are investing in cleaning up the data they feed into models to ensure accuracy. “You have to clean your data,” Groth says. “And that is tedious and expensive, but absolutely critical.”

As CEOs move ahead with expanding their AI investments and experimenting with AI, Groth cautions them to stay tightly focused on ROI. “The foundation of competitive advantage will be uniquely differentiated data that train models better,” he says, “and a culture that can put them to the most effective use.”

As regulators around the world grapple with how to contain the potential downsides of AI, a large percentage of CEOs appear to favor some form of regulatory control: 20% called regulation necessary to ensure ethical use and data protection and another 41% called it important but said regulation should avoid stifling innovation. That’s a total of 61% of CEOs who had a generally positive view of regulation.

In contrast, just 7% said AI regulation would be counterproductive, and 8% said it was unnecessary because market forces can help manage risks. Another 23% said inconsistent regulations across jurisdictions could pose challenges for companies. 

“Regulation is the big question,” says Groth. “We need to think through resilience and safety — and these are inextricably linked, especially as we experiment more.” 

As of today, AI regulation has not been much of an impediment to adoption: Just 14% of CEOs said regulation and compliance requirements had been a challenge. A much larger number, 42%, said issues of accuracy and data access have been an obstacle.

But broader concerns about industry regulation appear to be growing. This year, 38% of CEOs said they feared regulation could impact their companies, up from 23% last year. 

And while CEOs who believe AI will be a net positive for jobs (32%) outnumber those who believe it will be a net negative (18%), an even larger number (50%) said that it's too early to know.

Company culture will be key in this arena, says Groth. “The best leaders will work with their people to define the future of their jobs with AI at the center,” Groth says. “Incentivize your employees to experiment, adopt, and share learning — and to have agency over how AI is applied so that the joint productivity is higher.”