A new phenomenon emerged during the 2023 enterprise budgeting season this past fall. In industry after industry, financial managers began asking business leaders to prospectively factor in budget savings from AI initiatives. While these benefits were sought across AI-based use cases, generative AI was a significant focus. Some of those savings were expected to manifest in 2024. Other companies are assuming 2025 or 2026. Bain recently published the results of a September 2023 study of 100 pharmaceutical industry executives. It found that 40% of pharma executives expected to reduce their 2024 budgets due to planned savings driven by generative AI capabilities. The result was lowest for pharma companies with less than $1 billion in revenue (36%) and highest for the revenue range of $1 billion to $10 billion (44%).
