Rushing AI, missing ROI: Modus Create study of 500+ leaders reveals what’s slowing product innovation

In a new study from Modus Create, business leaders examine how product development teams are evolving their use of AI, from early experimentation to deeper integration. The study reveals AI trends and insights across all aspects of product development, from concept inception to team structures and shifting expertise of roles.

Reston, Va.—Business Wire—Modus Create, a global leader in digital product engineering, today released an independent study featuring insights from over 500 business leaders across Europe and the United States. In partnership with the research firm Ascend2, the study explores product engineering strategies in the AI landscape and, importantly, key internal challenges and lessons learned along the way.

Key study takeaways:

• Most companies claim AI integration, but few are fully integrated. While 84% of companies surveyed report AI integration, only 28% use AI for prototyping and 38% for coding.
• AI is an enabler for ROI, not a substitution. Of the leaders surveyed, 90% say pressure to prove ROI has intensified. The pressure to prove ROI is forcing teams to ground their AI initiatives in outcomes, prioritizing real value over rushed implementations.

“Teams have figured out how to move fast. But they need to understand how that speed connects to business value. Boards and investors aren’t asking how many releases you did this quarter, they’re asking what it delivered,” Sharon Lynch, Chief Executive Officer at Modus Create.

Study insights also reveal:

• Moving data to the cloud is the gateway to modernization, as confirmed by 95% of respondents who say their organizations are modernizing legacy systems, with a majority already operating on cloud-based infrastructure.
• Governance is slowing AI rollouts. 76% of organizations say AI enablement is stymied by regulatory or ethical issues. Many companies have basic monitoring and governance in place, but few have developed more advanced guardrails such as model-risk frameworks or formal ethics oversight.
• Product teams remain under construction. 91% of organizations have restructured their product functions, but not in the way most headlines suggest. The majority are re-skilling developers (53%) and hiring ML engineers or data scientists (43%), while only 30% have reduced traditional software-engineering roles.
• Most product teams need external expertise to move forward, as demonstrated by the 60% of teams who say finding the right partner is extremely important (up from 51% in 2023). This reflects widening skills and capacity gaps as AI adoption accelerates.

Download the complete research study and findings here.