Lenovo CIO Playbook 2026 finds Asia Pacific enterprises accelerating shift from AI pilots to scaled execution

Enterprises across Asia Pacific are moving decisively beyond artificial intelligence experimentation and into large-scale execution, as outlined in the Lenovo CIO Playbook 2026: The Race for Enterprise AI. The latest edition shows AI becoming a core pillar of enterprise strategy, with organisations prioritising measurable business outcomes, operational integration, and long-term scalability over isolated pilots.

The report indicates that 96% of organisations across the region plan to increase AI investment over the next 12 months, with average spending growth of 15%. Investment is spread across generative AI, agentic AI, public cloud AI services, on-premises infrastructure, and AI security and governance tools. This reflects a broad shift in how enterprises view AI, no longer as discretionary innovation spend, but as foundational infrastructure critical to competitiveness, growth, and resilience.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded into enterprise operating models, CIOs are taking on a more central role in orchestrating transformation across the business, balancing innovation with governance, performance with control, and speed with trust.

From ROI validation to outcomes-led enterprise AI

The 2026 Playbook marks a clear transition from validating AI return on investment to delivering outcomes at enterprise scale. While organisations remain confident in AI’s financial potential, there is increased discipline around ensuring that investments lead to sustained impact rather than short-term efficiency gains.

Across Asia Pacific, 88% of organisations expect a positive return on AI investments in 2026, with an average anticipated return of US$2.85 for every US$1 invested. This more grounded outlook reflects the reality that many organisations have already captured early productivity benefits and are now tackling the harder challenge of scaling AI across core systems, data environments, and workflows.

Revenue growth, profitability, and improved business and customer experience have emerged as the top priorities for CIOs in the year ahead. AI is increasingly positioned as a primary driver of these outcomes rather than a supporting tool. As a result, CIOs are under pressure to demonstrate how AI initiatives contribute directly to financial performance, customer engagement, and long-term operational resilience.

Sumir Bhatia, President, Asia Pacific, ISG at Lenovo, said the scale of planned investment underscores how central AI has become to enterprise decision-making. “When 96% of organisations 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. The differentiator will be how effectively organisations integrate AI, embedding it into infrastructure, operations, and security so value compounds over time.”

AI adoption expands beyond IT as agentic AI gains traction

AI adoption is no longer limited to IT departments. Across Asia Pacific, 66% of organisations are already piloting or systematically adopting AI, while a further 15% remain in early stages and 19% are still evaluating adoption. AI deployments are expanding rapidly into customer service, marketing, operations, finance, and industry-specific lines of business, reshaping how enterprises operate and compete.

Half of surveyed organisations report that non-IT departments are now funding AI initiatives. This shift is elevating the CIO’s role as an enterprise-wide enabler, responsible for providing shared platforms, guardrails, and capabilities that allow AI to scale safely across the organisation.

Interest in agentic AI is also accelerating. Agentic AI refers to systems that can set goals, make decisions, and take action within defined workflows. Today, 21% of organisations across the region report significant usage, while nearly 60% are exploring or planning limited deployments. Early adoption is most visible in sectors such as telecommunications, healthcare, and government, where operational complexity and scale make automation particularly valuable.

Despite rising interest, readiness remains uneven. Only 10% of organisations consider themselves ready for scaled agentic AI implementation, while 41% expect to need more than 12 months to reach that point. Security, governance, data quality, and integration complexity remain the main barriers, reinforcing the importance of strong operating models as autonomy increases.

Fan Ho, Executive Director and General Manager, Asia Pacific, Solutions and Services Group at Lenovo, said the cautious pace reflects a desire for reliability rather than hesitation. “Agentic AI represents a fundamental shift in how intelligence is embedded into the enterprise. With nearly 60% of organisations already exploring agentic AI and most taking a measured approach to scale, it shows that enterprises want AI that operates within core workflows, meets security and governance expectations, and delivers consistent outcomes.”

Hybrid AI architectures become the enterprise default

Infrastructure strategy is emerging as one of the most defining decisions for CIOs as AI workloads scale. The Playbook shows that 86% of organisations across Asia Pacific now incorporate on-premises or edge environments as part of hybrid AI architectures, effectively making hybrid AI the default deployment model.

This shift is driven by the need to balance performance, cost, data sovereignty, and regulatory requirements, particularly as AI moves from training into large-scale inferencing. Over a model’s lifecycle, inferencing can account for significantly higher compute costs than training, making workload placement and infrastructure optimisation critical.

In ASEAN+ markets, which include Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, 81% of organisations prefer hybrid AI architectures. Integration with devices, infrastructure, and enterprise systems has become the top AI investment priority in the sub-region, reflecting a focus on embedding AI into existing environments to extract value quickly.

Nigel Lee, General Manager, Singapore at Lenovo, said organisations in the region have moved decisively into execution. “ASEAN+ organisations have moved from AI experimentation to execution at scale. With 67% systematically adopting AI and integration with devices and infrastructure as the top investment priority, the focus is clear: embed AI into existing environments and extract value fast. The expected 2.7x return per dollar invested proves AI is business-critical infrastructure.”

The Playbook also highlights the growing importance of AI devices and edge inferencing. Deploying AI-enabled devices to enhance employee productivity and support local inferencing has risen to the second-highest IT investment priority for the coming year. By 2027, half of enterprise PC purchases are expected to include on-device AI agents, while most enterprises will rely on distributed edge infrastructure to support low-latency, responsive AI applications.

Looking ahead to 2026, the report identifies scale, rather than ambition, as the defining challenge for CIOs. While confidence in AI’s value remains high, only around half of AI proof-of-concepts make it into production. Closing this gap will require stronger governance, deeper skills, and tighter integration between technology, data, and operating models.