74% of enterprises now run AI workloads on hybrid cloudLIVE DATA

Enterprise AI
Benchmarks From
Practitioners.

Peer-sourced data on how Fortune 1000 companies deploy, spend on, and evaluate AI. From the people who actually make the decisions — not analysts, not vendors.

350+ enterprise AI leaders. Three proprietary indices. One quarterly study. The benchmark data your board deck is missing.

350+

Enterprise AI Leaders

12

Industries Represented

VP / Head of AI

Avg. Respondent Title

8,400+

Data Points Per Quarter

The Problem—

Everyone has an opinion on AI. Nobody has the data.

Gartner studies vendors. McKinsey sells frameworks. G2 solicits reviews from vendors themselves. Nobody asks the enterprise buyers what they actually spend, deploy, and think. Until now.

No Peer Benchmarks

You're making million-dollar AI decisions with no visibility into what your peers are spending, deploying, or getting in return.

Vendor-Sourced Data

Every benchmark you can find was funded by a vendor, written by an analyst who's never deployed, or based on self-reported case studies.

Board Deck Gap

Your CFO wants comparable data before approving next quarter's AI budget. You don't have it. Neither does anyone else.

Membership—

What you get. Free first year.

Free for founding members

Personalized Benchmark Report

See how your AI spend, adoption maturity, and vendor stack compare against anonymized peers in your industry and company size.

Three Proprietary Indices

Heat Index (what's accelerating), Vulnerability Index (which vendors are at risk), and Spend Index (where budgets actually go).

Peer Community Access

Connect with other Heads of AI, CTOs, and VP Engineering at companies deploying AI at scale. No vendors. No sales pitches.

Quarterly Research Dinners

Invite-only dinners in major markets. Structured discussions on enterprise AI challenges, moderated by Arcana researchers.

Real-Time Data Updates

Get notified as new benchmark data comes in — vendor sentiment shifts, spend category changes, and emerging deployment patterns.

How It Works—

30 minutes. Quarterly. That's the ask.

01

Join

Apply to the Arcana Research community. Open to enterprise technology leaders deploying AI — Heads of AI, CTOs, VP Engineering, and equivalent roles.

02

Participate

Complete the Arcana AI Enterprise Pulse — a quarterly study (~30 minutes) covering your AI spend, vendor evaluations, deployment status, and strategic priorities.

03

Benchmark

Receive your personalized benchmark report, full index access, peer community membership, and invitations to quarterly research dinners. First year free.

The Indices—

Three lenses on enterprise AI. All practitioner-sourced.

Our proprietary indices are built from quarterly study data collected from 350+ enterprise AI leaders. No vendor funding. No analyst opinion. Just deployment data.

AI SWE82
LLM Orch.78
RAG71
AI Analytics65
Agents44
AI Security58
AI SWE Tools75
Fine-tuning52
MLOps60
Data Pipelines55
Evaluation48
Governance42
LOW
HIGH
Q1 2026 · Arcana Research

Heat Index

What's accelerating

A 0–100 score for every major AI technology based on real enterprise deployment velocity, practitioner sentiment, and investment momentum. Not hype cycles — deployment data.

AI Software Engineering
+12.4%
LLM Orchestration
+9.1%
Retrieval-Augmented Gen.
+6.8%
AI-Assisted Analytics
+3.2%
Autonomous Agents
-2.1%

Illustrative data. Full index available to members.

Vulnerability Index

Who's at risk

Which AI vendors are at risk of losing enterprise customers — and to whom. Based on satisfaction scores, switching intent, and competitive displacement patterns from our practitioner panel.

Legacy NLP Platforms
-8.2%
First-Gen Chatbots
-11.5%
On-Prem ML Suites
-5.7%
Single-Cloud AI Stacks
-3.3%
Manual Annotation Tools
-14.1%

Illustrative data. Full index available to members.

Spend Index

Where budgets go

Where enterprise AI budgets actually flow — by category, company size, and industry. Tracks quarter-over-quarter allocation shifts across infrastructure, platform, and application layers.

Cloud AI Infrastructure
+4.2%
AI Dev Platforms
+2.8%
Vertical AI Applications
+5.1%
AI Security & Governance
+7.3%
AI Consulting & Services
-1.9%

Illustrative data. Full index available to members.

Try It—

Preview your benchmark.

Answer three questions and see a preview of how your organization compares to peers. The full report is available after joining the study.

Preview Your Benchmark—

Your Role

Company Size (employees)

Industry

The Community—

Practitioners only. No vendors. No analysts.

Our research community is exclusively enterprise technology leaders who deploy AI at scale. The people making the decisions, managing the budgets, and evaluating the vendors.

Head of AIChief Technology OfficerVP EngineeringChief Data OfficerSVP ProductDirector of MLChief Information OfficerVP AI Strategy

Company Size

1,000+ employees

Mid-market to Fortune 500

AI Maturity

Active deployment

Past experimentation, in production or pilot

Decision Authority

Budget influence

Involved in AI vendor and spend decisions

Arcana Daily Signal—

Enterprise AI intelligence, every morning

A daily briefing on what's shipping in enterprise AI. Buyer research insights, vendor moves, deployment patterns. Written for practitioners, sourced from our research community. Free.

Get Started—

The data your board deck is missing.

Join the Arcana AI Enterprise Pulse

Contribute 30 minutes per quarter. Get personalized benchmark data, three proprietary indices, peer community access, and invitations to quarterly research dinners. First year free for founding members.

For AI vendors interested in Pulse data access, contact ken@arcanaresearch.com