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Enterprise AI spend and outcomes are diverging, and available data quantify the gap.
The difficulty for CIOs is whether they can price, negotiate, and budget for AI before the ground shifts again.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in April 2026 that federal agencies more than doubled their use of AI between 2023 and 2024, while officials across the agencies GAO reviewed cited “the difficulty of determining pricing and overall cost of AI adoption” as a distinct, named acquisition challenge — separate from the technology’s performance. The report notes that agencies increasingly buy AI “as a service,” in which a vendor supplies capability on an ongoing basis rather than as a fixed-price product, replacing a budget line with an open-ended commitment.
A separate GAO review documented that agencies were effectively locked into vendors — not because of any restrictive clause, but because the cost of re-architecting around a competitor had become prohibitive once systems were built around one provider’s tools. A related audit found that 10 vendors account for roughly 73% of the most widely used federal software licenses, with one vendor, Microsoft, representing more than 31% of total spend — a concentration that leaves buyers negotiating from a structurally weaker position.
