Enterprises across the Asia Pacific will be speeding up their execution of AI implementations, according to the 4th edition of the Lenovo CIO Playbook 2026, titled, The Race for Enterprise AI, a report which was commissioned by Lenovo from research firm, IDC.

The report says 96% of organizations are planning to increase AI investments over the next 12 months. Likewise, they are expecting AI spending to grow 15%, covering genAI, agentic AI, public cloud AI services, on-prem AI infrastructure, and AI security tools.

“When 96% of organizations are planning a 15% on average increase in AI investment, it tells us that AI decisions are now being made at the core of enterprise strategy,” said Sumir Bhatia, president, Asia Pacific, ISG, Lenovo. “The differentiator will be how effectively organizations integrate AI, embedding it into infrastructure, operations, and security so value compounds over time.”

As AI becomes increasingly embedded into enterprise strategy, driving revenue growth, improving profitability, and enhancing business & customer experience have emerged as the top three business priorities for CIOs in Asia Pacific.

Building on last year’s AI-nomics focus on validating returns and business cases, the 2026 Playbook highlights a decisive shift toward outcomes-led AI adoption. CIOs remain confident in AI’s value, but are applying greater rigor to ensure investments translate into sustained impact.

88% of AP organizations expect a positive ROI from AI in 2026, with an average anticipated return of 2.8x (US$2.85 for every US$1 invested). Yet, scaling AI beyond pilots remains a key challenge, reinforcing the importance of governance, operating models, and lifecycle management.

AI adoption across Asia Pacific continues to accelerate and is no longer confined to IT. 66% of organizations are already piloting or systematically adopting AI, while 15% remain in early stages and 19% are considering adoption.

ASEAN+ reflects a similar pattern, with 67% piloting or systematically adopting AI, 15% in early stages, and 18% evaluating adoption.

AI is increasingly being deployed across customer service, marketing, operations, finance, and industry-specific lines of business, reshaping how enterprises operate and compete. Notably, half of surveyed organizations report that non-IT departments are now funding AI initiatives, elevating the CIO’s role as an enterprise-wide orchestrator.

Interest in Agentic AI is expected to double over the next 12 months. Today, 21% of Asia Pacific organizations report significant usage, while nearly 60% are exploring or planning limited deployments, particularly across telecommunications, healthcare, and government, where operational complexity and scale are highest.

Despite growing interest, readiness remains uneven. Only 10% of organizations consider themselves ready for scaled Agentic AI implementation, with 41% requiring more than 12 months to meaningfully scale. Security, governance, data quality, and integration complexity remain key barriers.

As AI workloads scale, infrastructure strategy is emerging as a defining CIO decision. The Playbook finds that 86% of organizations across Asia Pacific now incorporate on-premises or edge environments as part of hybrid AI architectures, effectively making hybrid AI the default model for enterprise AI deployments.

In ASEAN+, 81% of organizations prefer hybrid AI architectures, combining on-prem and edge environments to balance performance, security, and regulatory requirements. Key drivers include data privacy, advanced security needs, and the ability to optimize latency and cost as enterprises increasingly manage large-scale inferencing and mission-critical workloads.

The Lenovo CIO Playbook 2026 highlights three priorities shaping the year ahead:

AI inferencing becomes the value engine – Over a model’s lifecycle, inferencing costs can be up to 15 times higher than training. By 2030, 75% of AI compute will be dedicated to inferencing, with 80% of enterprises relying on distributed edge infrastructure.

Employee productivity rises as a strategic priority – Deploying AI devices to enhance productivity & local inferencing has climbed to the #2 IT Investment priority, alongside growing adoption of AI PCs, with 50% of enterprise PC purchases expected to shift to models with on-device AI agents.

Scaling AI remains the defining challenge – While 88% of organizations expect positive ROI, only around half of AI proof-of-concepts reach production, making scale - not ambition - the critical gap.