APAC companies are moving fast on AI spending even as they struggle to prove the payoff. KPMG said 70% of companies in APAC plan to invest more than US$50 million in AI over the next 12 months, but only 5% of those surveyed said they have established ROI with demonstrated business outcomes.
That gap is why APAC is drawing so much attention now. KPMG said 81% of Asia-Pacific companies surveyed already see AI delivering meaningful business value through productivity gains, cost savings or revenue growth, up from 69% three months earlier. The spending is rising because many firms can feel the benefit, and finance teams are still being asked to show it in numbers.
The survey covered more than 2,100 senior executives globally, including 521 respondents across Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. India reported the highest share of companies seeing business value from AI at 89%, while Australia stood at 86%. Those figures point to a market that is not waiting for perfect proof before writing larger checks.
But the evidence of control is uneven. About 80% of APAC respondents said they have full or partial visibility into AI operating costs, yet that still leaves a large group spending into a system they cannot fully track. Australia had 40% of companies monitoring AI costs fully and in real time, compared with 12% in South Korea. KPMG also said 55% of APAC companies had delayed or scaled back AI agent rollouts because operating costs began to exceed the value generated.
That is the part that matters most for the next wave of deployments. The first AI tools often looked cheap because they sat on the edge of the business. Agentic systems are different. They can push up operating costs through repeated model calls, human review time and wider workflow use, which is why the bill can climb faster than the value. Accenture said that in nearly every deployment it examined, fewer than 10% of users and workflows drove most of the AI bill, and BCG said companies should track AI costs at the workflow level and compare them with the business outcome produced.
In practice, that means the APAC firms spending more than US$50 million over the next year will need to know which teams, tasks and outputs are actually paying for themselves. KPMG’s figures suggest the region is still in the early phase of AI adoption, but the discipline around ROI is becoming harder to avoid. The companies that can measure value now may move fastest; the ones that cannot may keep spending without knowing which part of the bill is worth it.
