KPMG Survey: U.S. Firms Double AI Budgets, Scale Agent Deployments in 2026

The number that matters for every KPMG practitioner this quarter is $207 million. That is what U.S. organizations now project they will spend on AI over the next 12 months, nearly double the figures from the same period last year, according to KPMG's Q1 AI Quarterly Pulse, released March 31. The survey covered 2,110 C-suite and senior business leaders across 20 countries, three-quarters of whom represent organizations with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion. Its findings make clear that the window for pilots has closed.

The most striking sign of that shift is not the budget figure but the governance one. Sixty-three percent of surveyed leaders now require human validation of AI agent outputs, a figure that stood at 22% just one year ago. In the Americas, 46% of organizations are actively scaling AI agents, compared with the 11% that had reached enterprise-wide deployment in early 2025. The skills-gap barrier tells a similar story: 62% of respondents named it as a top obstacle to demonstrating AI ROI, up from just 25% last quarter, while those citing difficulty scaling use cases nearly doubled to 65%.

The workforce implication is just as direct. Nearly half of business leaders, 45%, said they would pay 11% to 15% more for talent with strong AI capabilities. "Investment in AI is at the highest level we've seen yet and it continues on a sharp upward trajectory, with AI agent deployments accelerating," said Steve Chase, Global Head of AI and Digital Innovation at KPMG. The corollary is the uncomfortable half of that sentence: routine tasks that carry no judgment premium are precisely what clients are now designing agents to handle.

For audit practitioners, the near-term shift is toward technology-assisted evidence collection and risk analytics. KPMG's product and enablement teams must build compliant, auditable AI toolchains before auditors can deploy them without breaching independence standards or client-confidentiality obligations. The immediate move: enroll in KPMG's internal AI sandbox and certification programs before busy season locks every calendar slot available.

Tax teams face a parallel redesign, with generative AI entering research, compliance mapping, and return-drafting workflows. Because client data sensitivity is highest in tax, governance requirements there are the most demanding, which means practitioners who understand both the technical capability and the regulatory guardrails will be leading those redesigns rather than watching from the outside. This week, identify one repeatable research or compliance-mapping task on a current matter and request internal genAI tool access to pilot it against a lower-risk engagement.

Advisory professionals, particularly those in technology consulting and data and analytics, sit closest to the engagements the Q1 data is now signaling. Ninety-one percent of surveyed leaders said data security, privacy, and risk will shape their AI strategies over the next six months, a direct referral pipeline for KPMG's risk and cybersecurity practices. Chase framed the stakes plainly: "There is no agentic future without trust and no trust without governance that keeps pace." For advisory staff, the concrete move this week is to get credentialed in one agent-architecture or AI-governance framework, because that is what the $207 million is already being budgeted to buy.