Key Questions Answered
What share of technology leaders are using AI-assisted tools?
What share of those using AI-assisted tools are measuring their value or ROI?
How is the AI ROI structured in terms of maturity, and how does that differ based on company size?
How does AI ROI maturity level affect technology leaders’ evaluation of AI assistance?
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Methodology
The 31th edition of the Developer Nation survey reached more than 11,500 respondents from 95 countries around the world. This research report series delves into key developer trends for Q1 2026 and beyond.
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About this Report
Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been embedded in technology organisations, powering systems such as search engines, recommendation algorithms, and fraud detection tools. However, it is now far more visible and strategically prioritised, with generative AI chatbots, coding assistants, and enterprise automation tools bringing it to the centre of business planning. As AI investment scales, a new pressure is emerging: the need to justify it. Boards want evidence, finance teams want numbers, and developers caught in the middle are discovering that believing AI works and being able to prove it are two very different things.
This report examines how developers in leadership roles – hereinafter referred to as technology leaders – are experiencing and evaluating AI value today. We examine how they rate what it delivers, whether they measure it, and how rigorous those measurements are. The findings are drawn from 2,341 professional developers working in leadership positions in SlashData’s 31st global developer survey.
This report provides an overview of the headline findings. For a full deep dive, including breakdowns by role, sector, region, and agentic AI maturity level, see the full report, The state of AI ROI measurement in software teams.