78% of Enterprises Stalled With AI Adoption — Because They Don’t Trust Their Revenue Data: Clari Labs Research

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 19, 2025--

New research from Clari Labs on AI Adoption in Running Enterprise Revenue shows that while AI is proven to unlock revenue growth, 78% of enterprises are still in the early stages of AI adoption — and 67% of enterprises don’t trust the revenue data that AI depends on. To unlock the full potential of AI and agents, enterprises must re-architect how they run revenue.

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The New Revenue Partners: CIO and CRO

Enterprise AI success now depends on deep alignment between the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and the Chief Information Officer (CIO). In leading companies, these two executives are co-authoring a new paradigm: revenue growth powered by data, guided workflows, AI, and Revenue Context to understand who did what, when, and what outcome it drove.

As CIOs take a more active role in driving revenue outcomes, they’re asking: What’s the state of AI for Revenue adoption across enterprises? Where are peers struggling — and where are they winning? And what foundation is truly required to scale AI for Revenue? To answer these questions, Clari Labs surveyed enterprise revenue leaders across hundreds of major enterprises.

The Rise of the Revenue Architect

To capitalize on AI’s potential, enterprises are building new roles and structures to run revenue with precision and context:

As a result, a new enterprise career is emerging: the Revenue Architect. This enterprise leader is responsible for ensuring the organization is structurally ready to scale AI for Revenue — by delivering trusted data, aligning systems, and enabling consistent execution across go-to-market teams.

Forward-thinking enterprises are investing in Revenue Architects to orchestrate the transformation to predictive revenue and deploy AI agents with confidence — ensuring those agents succeed by equipping them with the Revenue Context they need to guide decisions and drive the right actions.

Key Findings: AI Adoption in Running Enterprise Revenue

While Clari’s customers represent some of the earliest and most successful enterprise adopters of AI, this new research benchmarks AI adoption across the broader market (not Clari customers) — surveying 400 enterprise CROs, Chief Sales Officers (CSOs), and Revenue Operations leaders at companies with 1,000+ employees across North America. The research reveals that most enterprises have yet to build the foundation needed to scale AI for Revenue successfully:

67% of enterprise leaders don’t trust their revenue data.

AI will transform revenue — but it requires all revenue data, activities, and outcomes to be centralized and unified .

Revenue data is an amalgamation of structured and unstructured data that today is scattered across CRMs, spreadsheets, emails, recorded conversations, BI systems, and siloed tools, teams, and regions. The inability to centralize and easily visualize revenue data erodes trust and creates blind spots.

49% of revenue leaders only discover revenue risk after missing their number.

CRMs only capture part of the picture. Spreadsheets are out of date. Activity data, conversational data, and email data live in silos.

In most enterprises, critical revenue teams operate without the rigor and governance to understand who did what, when, and what outcome it drove — making it impossible to drive consistent execution and guide teams and AI agents to win.

67% of enterprises in North America missed their 2024 revenue target.

Despite that, 91% of revenue leaders are confident about hitting their revenue goals in 2025. That optimism, however, depends on addressing deep operational flaws.

Forty percent of leaders say their reps are spending time on the wrong accounts and activities, while 64% report losing up to 30% of pipeline due to handoff gaps, organizational silos, and missed opportunities.

AI is the only way to close the execution gap — exposing new insights, guiding teams through critical motions like pipeline reviews, forecast calls, and account plans.

Frontline distrust is the top barrier to AI success.

The #1 blocker to AI adoption? Lack of trust in AI outputs from frontline sellers.

AI must prove value to sellers to achieve widespread adoption. Most AI today focuses on narrow tasks, not the bigger picture. Reps are flooded with disconnected suggestions that lack strategic context.

True guided selling isn't about telling reps what to do — it's about helping them see the larger strategy, knowing how and where to spend their time, spotting opportunity and risk — executing like the CRO of their territory.

When enterprises miss revenue targets, executives’ jobs are at risk.

Forty-three percent of enterprise leaders say missed revenue targets will lead to job cuts. To avoid that risk, enterprise revenue leaders are betting on AI to drive predictable growth.

Thirty percent of revenue leaders plan to increase their investment in AI — recognizing its potential to guide teams through critical activities like pipeline reviews, forecasting reviews, and cadences to ensure the right actions happen consistently, on time, and are aligned to company revenue objectives.

Unlock the Full Value of AI for Revenue

Addressing the challenges uncovered in the research, from data fragmentation to frontline distrust, Clari today announced Revenue Context TM — the industry’s first set of platform capabilities designed to ensure AI and agents work and collaborate at enterprise scale across the entire revenue process, end to end.

Revenue Context enables Revenue Architects to comprehensively track all human- and machine-driven signals across deals, accounts, reps, regions, segments, products, and more. All context is captured in Clari’s revenue data platform, the world’s largest managing over $5 trillion in revenue.

Clari customers are already realizing the impact of AI at enterprise scale:

“Most CIOs lack the data and context to answer the fundamental question: who did what, when, that led to what outcome? Without Revenue Context, AI will fail them,” said Andy Byrne, CEO and Co-Founder, Clari. “Furthermore, without Revenue Context, the CRO cannot answer the most important question in business: will they meet, beat, or miss on Revenue? The CIO and CRO have an industry-changing opportunity to easily answer these questions and use AI to transform how they run revenue across the enterprise.”

Additional Resources

About Clari

Clari is the only Enterprise Revenue Orchestration leader that delivers Revenue Context to run revenue and inform AI and agents at enterprise scale.

The Clari Revenue Orchestration Platform leverages all structured and unstructured data from every human- and machine-generated revenue interaction into a single, time-series data model, the world’s largest of its kind — managing over $5 trillion in revenue for global enterprises.

More than 1,500 organizations — including Okta, Adobe, Workday, Zoom, and Cisco — run revenue on Clari to improve win rates, prevent slipped deals, forecast with accuracy, and boost the productivity of all revenue-critical employees.

Clari: Run Revenue ® with AI + Revenue Context. Learn more: https://www.clari.com/

Survey Methodology

The survey was conducted by Censuswide, among a sample of 400 respondents in North America — Chief Revenue Officers, VPs of Sales, and those responsible for planning and executing Revenue Operations. The data was collected between January 31-February 11, 2025. Censuswide abides by and employs members of the Market Research Society and follows the MRS code of conduct and ESOMAR principles. Censuswide is also a member of the British Polling Council.

78% of Enterprises Stalled With AI Adoption — Because They Don’t Trust Their Revenue Data: Clari Labs Research

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Saudi Arabia bombed Yemen's port city of Mukalla on Tuesday after a weapons shipment from the United Arab Emirates arrived for separatist forces in the war-torn country, and warned that it viewed Emirati actions as “extremely dangerous.”

The bombing followed tensions over the advance of Emirates-backed separatist forces known as the Southern Transitional Council. The council and its allies issued a statement supporting the UAE's presence, even as others allied with Saudi Arabia demanded that Emirati forces withdraw from Yemen in 24 hours' time.

The UAE called for “restraint and wisdom” and disputed Riyadh’s allegations. But shortly after that, it said it would withdraw its remaining troops in Yemen. It remained unclear whether the separatists it backs will give up the territory they recently took.

The confrontation threatened to open a new front in Yemen's decade-long war, with forces allied against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels possibly turning their sights on each other in the Arab world's poorest nation.

It also further strained ties between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, neighbors on the Arabian Peninsula that increasingly have competed over economic issues and regional politics, particularly in the Red Sea area. Tuesday’s airstrikes and ultimatum appeared to be their most serious confrontation in decades.

“I expect a calibrated escalation from both sides. The UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council is likely to respond by consolidating control,” said Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemen expert and founder of the Basha Report, a risk advisory firm.

“At the same time, the flow of weapons from the UAE to the STC is set to be curtailed following the port attack, particularly as Saudi Arabia controls the airspace.”

A military statement carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency announced the strikes on Mukalla, which it said came after ships arrived there from Fujairah in the UAE.

“The ships’ crew had disabled tracking devices aboard the vessels, and unloaded a large amount of weapons and combat vehicles in support of the Southern Transitional Council’s forces,” the statement said.

“Considering that the aforementioned weapons constitute an imminent threat, and an escalation that threatens peace and stability, the Coalition Air Force has conducted this morning a limited airstrike that targeted weapons and military vehicles offloaded from the two vessels in Mukalla,” it added.

It wasn't clear if there were any casualties.

The Emirati Foreign Ministry hours later denied it shipped weapons but acknowledged it sent the vehicles “for use by the UAE forces operating in Yemen.” It also claimed Saudi Arabia knew about the shipment ahead of time.

The ministry called for “the highest levels of coordination, restraint and wisdom, taking into account the existing security challenges and threats.”

The Emirati Defense Ministry later said it would withdraw its remaining troops from Yemen over “recent developments and their potential repercussions on the safety and effectiveness of counter-terrorism operations.” It gave no timeline for the withdrawal. The UAE broadly withdrew its forces from Yemen years earlier.

Yemen’s anti-Houthi forces not aligned with the separatists declared a state of emergency Tuesday and ended their cooperation with the UAE. They issued a 72-hour ban on border crossings in territory they hold, as well as entries to airports and seaports, except those allowed by Saudi Arabia. It remained unclear whether that coalition, governed under the umbrella of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, would remain intact.

The Southern Transitional Council’s AIC satellite news channel aired footage of the strike's aftermath but avoided showing damage to the armored vehicles.

“This unjustified escalation against ports and civilian infrastructure will only strengthen popular demands for decisive action and the declaration of a South Arabian state,” the channel said.

The attack likely targeted a ship identified as the Greenland, a vessel flagged out of St. Kitts. Tracking data analyzed by the AP showed the vessel had been in Fujairah on Dec. 22 and arrived in Mukalla on Sunday. The second vessel could not be immediately identified.

Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the U.N. humanitarian office, urged combatants to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure, like the port, saying any disruption to its operations “risks affecting the already dire humanitarian situation and humanitarian supply chains.”

Mukalla is in Yemen's Hadramout governorate, which the council seized in recent days. The port city is some 480 kilometers (300 miles) northeast of Aden, which has been the seat of power for anti-Houthi forces after the rebels seized the capital, Sanaa, in 2014.

Yemen, on the southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula off East Africa, borders the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The war there has killed more than 150,000 people, including fighters and civilians, and created one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters.

The Houthis, meanwhile, have launched attacks on hundreds of ships in the Red Sea corridor over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, disrupting regional shipping. The U.S., which earlier praised Saudi-Emirati efforts to end the crisis over the separatists, has launched airstrikes against the rebels under both Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Tuesday's strike in Mukalla comes after Saudi Arabia targeted the council in airstrikes Friday that analysts described as a warning for the separatists to halt their advance and leave the governorates of Hadramout and Mahra.

The council had pushed out forces there affiliated with the Saudi-backed National Shield Forces, another group in the anti-Houthi coalition.

Those aligned with the council have increasingly flown the flag of South Yemen, which was a separate country from 1967-1990. Demonstrators have been rallying to support political forces calling for South Yemen to secede again.

A statement Tuesday from Saudi Arabia's Foreign Ministry directly linked the council's advance to the Emiratis for the first time.

“The kingdom notes that the steps taken by the sisterly United Arab Emirates are extremely dangerous,” it said.

Allies of the council later issued a statement in which they showed no sign of backing down.

Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.

This frame grab from video broadcast by Saudi state television on Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025, shows what the kingdom describes as a shipment of weapons and armored vehicles coming from the United Arab Emirates, at Mukalla, Yemen. (Saudi state television via AP)