KUNGFU.AI Surveyed 300 C-Suite Executives. 74% Admit They Faked Confidence in Their Own AI Strategy.

November 4, 2026 · Josh Agusti, Founder, Aiven Consulting Group

Ask a chief executive how confident they are in their company's AI strategy and the answer is almost always a confident one. A new survey suggests that answer is often theater.

Wakefield Research, working on behalf of the AI consultancy KUNGFU.AI, polled 300 U.S. C-suite executives at companies with at least 500 million dollars in annual revenue for what it calls the Wayfinding Report. Seventy four percent of them admitted they have projected more confidence in their AI strategy than they actually felt.

That number alone would be a story about executive communication style. What makes it a story about strategy is what sits right next to it. Ninety nine percent of the same executives said their organization has rebuilt or significantly changed its AI strategy within the last 24 months. Put those two figures together and a different pattern appears, one that looks less like poor leadership and more like an honest response to a genuinely moving target. Executives are not simply lying about having a plan. They are performing certainty about a plan that keeps needing to change out from under them.

Why performing confidence has become the default

The instinct to project confidence while quietly rebuilding the plan behind the scenes is not new to business leadership, but AI raises the stakes in a specific way. Most prior waves of enterprise technology, from cloud migration to CRM rollouts, had a reasonably stable endpoint executives could describe and defend to a board. Generative and agentic AI do not behave the same way. The underlying capability set changes every few months, vendors reposition constantly, and the regulatory frameworks that will eventually govern all of it are still being written in real time. Saying plainly to a board or a customer that the strategy is still being figured out can read as weakness, even when it is the most accurate description available. The result, according to the survey, is a widening gap between the confidence leaders project outward and the confidence they report privately. Closing that gap usually starts with naming it, which is part of why more companies are turning to structured AI readiness assessments rather than relying on executive instinct alone to gauge where they actually stand.

The strategy churn is the real signal, not the embarrassment

The report's most striking number might not be the 74 percent confidence gap at all. It may be the 99 percent of executives who said their organization overhauled its AI strategy within the past two years, alongside the two in three who believe their current business model could be unviable by 2029 because of AI-driven disruption. Read together, these figures describe an executive population that is not confused about whether AI matters. They are confused, reasonably, about what to commit to when the ground underneath the decision moves every quarter. That confusion carries a direct bottom-line cost: only 14 percent of the surveyed executives said most of their AI investment has actually paid off. A strategy rebuilt annually rarely has time to compound into results, and a board sold on false certainty has little basis to hold anyone accountable when the numbers come in flat. Some of that gap closes once AI governance moves from a slide in a board deck to an actual operating discipline, with clear AI governance ownership and documented decision rights, rather than an assumption that someone, somewhere, already owns it.

What separates leaders who keep progressing from those who keep resetting

KUNGFU.AI frames its own answer to this churn as a wayfinding model: pick a working destination, watch for the signals that say it needs to change, and change course deliberately rather than defensively. Whatever framework a company adopts, the underlying discipline usually looks the same. Build review cycles that expect the AI strategy to be revisited on a fixed schedule rather than only when something breaks. Give the executive team language for honest uncertainty that does not read as weakness to the board. Tie any AI budget renewal to evidence rather than enthusiasm. Getting that discipline in place is increasingly why companies look for outside help designing their AI operating model rather than building it ad hoc inside an already stretched leadership team.

The honest version of AI leadership right now is less about having the right five-year roadmap and more about building the muscle to keep adjusting one without losing the organization's trust in the process. Executives who can say they changed course because the evidence told them to are describing discipline. Executives who can only say "trust me" are the ones a report like this one is written for.

Key Takeaways

A Wakefield Research survey of 300 U.S. C-suite executives at companies with at least 500 million dollars in annual revenue found that 74% admit they have projected more confidence in their AI strategy to stakeholders than they actually felt.
Ninety-nine percent of respondents said their organization has rebuilt or significantly changed its AI strategy within the last 24 months, and two-thirds believe their current business model could become unviable by 2029 because of AI-driven disruption.
Only 14% of the surveyed executives said most of their AI investment has actually paid off, suggesting the confidence gap is less about executive communication style and more a symptom of strategies built for a destination that keeps moving.