For a while, the AI conversation in business circles was about capability.
Can it write the email. Can it summarize the contract. Can it speed up the workflow. That conversation is over, and a new report from KPMG just put a number on what replaced it.
KPMG surveyed 1,224 senior leaders at large global organizations, including 304 US executives, and backed the survey with in-depth interviews across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The question wasn’t whether companies want AI. Every company wants AI at this point. The question was what companies are actually looking for when they choose who helps them run it.
The answer: AI capability is now the single most important consideration US buyers use when selecting a managed services provider. Not price. Not contract length. Not brand reputation. Capability — specifically, the ability to deliver AI in a way the business can trust and control.
Two numbers back that up. Ninety-three percent of US companies surveyed said managed services are important for agentic AI delivery — agentic AI being the kind that doesn’t just answer a question but takes actions, makes decisions, and operates with some degree of independence inside a business process. Eighty-seven percent said managed services are highly integrated into their digital transformation strategy. These aren’t soft sentiment numbers. They’re describing where real budget is already moving.
Read those two findings together and the shift becomes obvious. Companies aren’t asking “can this AI perform the task.” They’ve mostly answered that question already. What they’re asking now is “who do I trust to make sure this AI behaves the way my business needs it to behave, every time, without me having to watch it constantly.” That’s not a capability question. That’s a governance question, and the market is now pricing it as the deciding factor in a purchase.
This is worth sitting with, because it confirms something the Baseline has argued from the start, long before this report existed. Raw AI capability was never the bottleneck. A model that’s fast and fluent but ungoverned is a liability dressed up as a feature. The real constraint — the thing buyers are now telling researchers they care about more than anything else — is whether someone can guarantee the AI operates inside a structure that holds up under real use. Evidence-based. Accountable. Disclosed when it’s uncertain. Checked before it acts, not cleaned up after.
That’s the exact gap a framework like Codex 3.5 exists to close. Ninety-three percent of companies aren’t asking for a faster model. They’re asking for a governed one, even if most of them don’t have the language yet to call it that. KPMG’s survey just gave that instinct a number. The market figured out what it actually wants before the industry built the vocabulary to describe it.
The methodology behind this is solid enough to lean on. Over twelve hundred senior leaders, the majority from companies with revenue between one billion and ten billion dollars, paired with direct executive interviews rather than survey responses alone. This isn’t a marketing claim dressed up as research. It’s a real measurement of where enterprise buying behavior already sits in 2026.
The conclusion writes itself, and it isn’t subtle. Capability got the world’s attention. Governance is what’s going to earn its trust. The companies that figure out how to deliver both, with the discipline to prove it rather than just claim it, are the ones buyers are already telling researchers they want to find.
Look no further than here “The Faust Baseline” is the place to land your looking.
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