Investors are pressuring companies to get serious about AI

• CEOs face pressure from investors to enhance their AI strategies.
• Investor demand for AI adoption surged from 68% to 90% from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, according to KPMG.
• One investor told BI there's no board of a VC-backed startup that isn't discussing AI.

Executives, investors, and boards are united on one thing: AI.

Last month, enterprise AI company Dataiku published a survey that showed that CEOs are putting pressure on themselves, and each other, to ramp up their AI strategy.

But a new report from KPMG shows that some of the heat is coming from investors. Investor pressure to adopt AI has jumped from 68% to 90% from the last quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025, according to the firm's survey of 130 executives from a mix of public and private companies with over $1 billion in revenue.

KPMG's head of ecosystems Todd Lohr said he expects investors to double down more, potentially driving a rise in activism.

"There's a signal of 'change is going to continue to come,' especially if you're not moving fast enough," he told Business Insider. "There's going to be others that are going to move your hand for you."

Lohr said board members, too, are becoming more attuned to AI.

"I do a lot of speeches for boards and board members, and they're getting pretty deep on the technology because they want to make sure they're asking the right questions for how it's going to disrupt their businesses," he said.

Several venture capitalists told BI that they are actively driving their portfolio companies to deploy AI.

"We've been working with our portfolio companies to incorporate GenAI features into their product portfolios," Jai Das, president and partner at enterprise technology firm Sapphire Ventures, told BI. "AI is a generational shift, and companies that don't embrace it in a big way will be history footnotes versus becoming companies of consequence."

Maria Palma, general partner at Freestyle Capital, said the firm has been having discussions with all its portfolio companies on how they are integrating AI. It's also hosting a series of "optional sessions on AI's potential to improve workflows across various departments, like engineering or marketing," she wrote to BI by email.

In the age of AI, Palma's thesis is that companies should have "strong peripheral vision" so they can keep an eye on the tools competitors are deploying. "Adopting AI in your company won't guarantee its survival. But the lack of it? That will guarantee to put your company at a huge disadvantage, and ultimately place it on a path toward extinction," she wrote.

In some cases, though, companies are scrambling to save face. They're applying AI features as a quick fix rather than analyzing where they can achieve real gains, founders of companies developing those AI features told BI.

This results in an "AI arms race that creates real risks," Florian Douetteau, Dataiku's CEO, told BI.

"Without a unified strategy across the business, organizations expose themselves to chaos: siloed experimentation of point solutions, unmonitored AI application usage, data leakage, cost overruns, and more," Douetteau said. "AI is raw power, and it can only work to drive measurable business results if it is controlled."

Darren Louie, a vice president at Proof — a platform for digital identity and verifications — echoed the idea.

"Investor expectations are understandably rising, so businesses are under growing pressure to demonstrate ROI on their AI initiatives, but many of these companies have serious and valid concerns about compliance and security," Louie said.

Across the board, spending on software has accelerated among Global 2000 enterprises in the last two quarters, said FirstMark Capital's Matt Turck. Within that, there's been a "meaningful increase" in spend on AI tooling and applications as companies move from consulting projects and proof of concepts to deploying AI, Turck told BI via text.

That means discussions about AI are happening constantly, he said.

"As an investor, I don't think there's any board of VC-backed startups where there isn't a current conversation on using AI throughout the company to increase efficiency across functions like development, sales, marketing, etc," he said.

The big question, though, is whether the Trump Administration's sweeping new tariffs will change things, he said.

The "tariff nonsense is particularly painful because it may (or may not) have stopped that trend — we'll see what the Q2 numbers look like," Turck said.