Investor Expectations for AI Investment in 2026: When the Rubber Hits the Road

This is the first in a series of reports from WPA on investor expectations around AI

In 2025, Companies Accelerated the Conversation Around AI

Throughout 2025, most companies were announcing or responding to consistent investor queries on AI strategies and its potential impact on revenue creation and/or cost savings. In the second quarter of 2025, 287 companies in the S&P 500 discussed AI, a 32% increase versus the prior quarter with 10 of 11 sectors of the index seeing a quarterly uptick¹. 2025 has been a year of acknowledgement and acceleration for AI, but specific details of tangible impact on results were, in our opinion, scant.

While direct “picks and shovels” AI suppliers (LLMs, cloud, hardware and energy) are clear beneficiaries from direct investment, companies outside those suppliers that embraced the benefits of AI, laid out rough strategies, frameworks, and near-term initiatives, but provided limited metrics to guide investors as to how these efforts will impact financials. That task is left to investors to ascertain whether AI will provide a sustainable competitive advantage or is more a defensive move reminiscent of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. Investors have been until recently tolerant of the lack of specific details, giving many companies a pass on providing specific guidance.

2026 Will Be Different

As we enter the fourth quarter of 2025 and as companies begin to prepare for their year-end results and initial 2026 guidance, investor expectations are heightened as concerns around the timing of a positive contribution from AI investments have forced increased scrutiny on returns. Organizational transformation to enable the benefits of AI will take time as companies will need to identify tools, reconfigure operations and accelerate investment.

We believe that investors will start to discount vague promises and anecdotal examples of AI deployments and instead demand quantifiable goals and an articulation of expected returns from AI specific programs. This puts companies in a difficult situation as the pace of change is substantial, the skills and investments required material and the timing of payoffs are still uncertain.

Despite the challenges of providing guidance in such a dynamic environment, companies must move beyond the AI “Me Too” phase and start to provide additional detail so investors can identify how AI drives durable competitive advantages and when investments will pay off.

DoorDash: Canary in the Coal Mine?

DoorDash reported results on November 5th, where they announced a substantial increase in tech spend for F2026, contributing to a ~17% sell-off in the shares on the following trading day. To be clear, DoorDash’s material spending increase was not solely attributable to AI as the company plans to consolidate three different tech stacks into one to integrate prior acquisitions. Even a tech forward company like DoorDash is allocating incremental spend to enable the infrastructure for AI. As CEO Tony Xu stated on the earnings call:

“I think we would write software pretty differently from how we used to do it. And so there's a lot of work in order to architect how we set up the architecture, so we can manage both agent workflows as well as how you would deploy software, test software, write software…”

We expect many companies may be compelled to invest in their underlying architecture to enable the full capability of AI, spending that cannot be immediately offset by AI driven efficiencies. How companies manage investor messaging and guide to the expected cost and returns will be vital to reduce near term volatility in their share price.

A Need to Manage Expectations and Articulate AI’s Benefits

Investors will handicap which companies’ AI efforts are tangible versus vaporware and will begin to award premium valuations to those companies that can adequately articulate the benefits of accelerated investments to drive differentiation through genuine innovation or sustainable cost savings.

The pressure of near-term investing will likely weigh on the shares of some companies but those who can define a path to eventual returns either via savings or increased revenue drivers will differentiate themselves and successfully manage this period of accelerated investments. There is clearly a tremendous amount of opportunity via the implementation of AI, but in 2026, investors will increasingly demand that companies have a clear and articulated path to these benefits.

1. Factset, Sept 5, 2025