AI strategy miscalculation has emerged as the third most concerning emerging enterprise risk, as organizations move to scale AI without always aligning investments with business priorities, risk tolerance and organizational readiness, according to a Gartner survey published November 2.

The finding comes from Gartner’s Quarterly Emerging Risk Report for the third quarter of 2026, based on a survey of 308 enterprise risk management leaders, auditors and senior executives. 

Gartner defines AI strategy miscalculation as the risk of investing too aggressively in AI, selecting unsuitable use cases or moving ahead before an organization is prepared to manage the technology’s operational, cultural and AI governance implications. 

Gartner said organizations can create additional exposure when competitive pressure to adopt AI moves faster than their ability to assess whether individual use cases are appropriate and whether the organization has the capabilities required to support them.

“AI risk is moving beyond technology and governance concerns into the core of enterprise strategy,” said Kevin Mercado, Senior Principal Analyst, Research, in the Gartner Risk & Audit Practice. “The emergence of AI strategy miscalculation and AI-driven competitive displacement reflects growing concern that organizations could either make major decisions based on anticipated benefits that fail to materialize or lose ground to competitors that use AI more effectively.”

AI strategy miscalculation ranked behind AI discovery of cyber vulnerabilities and geopolitical energy supply shocks among the emerging risks identified by respondents.

The survey also identified AI-driven competitive displacement as another new risk entering the top five. 

AI Strategy Puts Data and Governance Readiness Under Pressure

For chief data officers (CDOs), the findings highlight a growing challenge as AI investment moves from experimentation into broader enterprise deployment. 

Decisions about whether an AI use case is ready to scale increasingly depend on the quality of the underlying data, governance controls and the organization’s ability to measure outcomes.

Gartner recommends evaluating AI investments as a portfolio of business decisions, with organizations tying initiatives to clear strategic priorities, validating readiness before scaling and measuring AI’s impact on decision-making rather than productivity alone.

That requires CDOs to work across business, technology, risk and compliance functions to establish the data and governance foundations needed before AI systems are deployed at scale.