Montreal, QC – February 4th 2026 – Quadbridge today released a new whitepaper declaring a fundamental shift in how AI is being adopted in the mid-market: for the first time, leadership, trust, and governance are required before organizations feel confident, not after.

Drawing on insights from Quadbridge’s AI Ideation Sessions and its Annual Client Survey of more than 250 North American mid-market IT leaders, The State of AI Adoption in the Mid-Market reveals why many organizations are moving quickly with AI but struggling to advance with scale.

AI is already embedded across productivity tools, analytics, customer engagement, and operations. But unlike previous technology waves, it is evolving faster than the models organizations have historically relied on to adopt technology safely. As a result, leaders are being pulled into unfamiliar territory earlier in the adoption curve – asked to define ownership, risk, and accountability before standards, norms, or best practices have stabilized.

“The pressure to adopt AI arrived before the playbook,” said Steve Leslie, CEO at Quadbridge. “What feels like reasonable caution right now – slowing down or waiting for clarity – is increasingly risky, as adoption lags while expectations continue to accelerate.”

A Market Under Pressure, Not Uninformed

To understand how mid-market organizations are navigating this moment, Quadbridge convened AI Ideation Sessions in late 2025, bringing together participants from across the AI ecosystem including IT leaders, business executives, investors, academics, consultants, and solution providers. These sessions surfaced a consistent tension: ambition is high, experimentation is widespread, but confidence in how to govern and scale AI responsibly remains low.

That tension is being amplified by mounting external pressure. Participants with exposure to private equity and institutional investment noted that AI strategy and maturity are increasingly treated as signals of leadership effectiveness and operational discipline in diligence and valuation discussions.

AI is no longer viewed as optional innovation, it is becoming a credibility test.

Three Market Signals Leaders Can’t Ignore

Quadbridge’s research points to three defining signals shaping AI adoption right now:

• AI adoption is already happening – readiness is lagging: While 41% of mid-market IT leaders rank AI as a top investment priority for 2026 and 77% of organizations are already developing an AI strategy, most remain stuck in shallow experimentation, constrained by uncertainty around ownership, sequencing, and control.
• This is not an IT initiative – it’s a leadership one: Organizations making progress treat AI as a business capability owned by executives, not a technology project delegated to IT. Executive sponsorship and a clear AI strategy rank as the top enablers of adoption. Where AI is confined to IT alone, focus is fragmented and progress stalls.
• Trust, not technology, is the gating factor – for now: Privacy, security, and data quality concerns ranked as the top barriers to progress, despite few organizations reporting firsthand AI failures. Fear is outpacing experience because the pace of change has collapsed traditional confidence-building cycles.

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“What we’re seeing isn’t hesitation, it’s the result of compression,” said Todd Simpson, Senior VP, Innovation, Services & Technology at Quadbridge. “AI is forcing leadership decisions about ownership, trust, and value much earlier than organizations are used to. The gap isn’t belief in AI; it’s the absence of established ways to govern and scale it at this speed.”

Four Pillars Forced by This Moment

The whitepaper outlines four pillars that emerged as critical conditions for moving from experimentation to AI at scale. The research shows these pillars cannot be tackled sequentially, they must move together.

• Intent: Clear leadership direction anchored to tangible business outcomes, not abstract transformation goals.
• Guardrails: Governance and accountability that replace ambiguity with confidence and enable responsible experimentation.
• Data Foundation: Data foundations, internal skills, and ecosystem support required to sustain and expand AI use.
• Culture: Leadership behaviors that normalize learning, shared ownership, and responsible use across the organization.

“Organizations can’t sequence their way out of uncertainty,” said Todd Simpson, Senior VP, Innovation, Services & Technology at Quadbridge. “Momentum builds only when intent, guardrails, capability, and culture develop together – even before everything feels settled.”

A Defining Moment for the Mid-Market

AI adoption in the mid-market has entered a new phase. Experimentation is no longer the differentiator – execution is. As the pace of change accelerates, organizations will be defined less by how quickly they test AI and more by how intentionally they scale it.

The organizations that lead will not be the ones that wait for certainty, but those that build confidence as they go.

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The full whitepaper, The State of AI Adoption in the Mid-Market, is now available. Download the report here.

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About Quadbridge

Founded in 2007, Quadbridge is a North American technology solutions provider helping mid-market organizations move from AI experimentation to AI at scale. By combining modern infrastructure, modern work, security, AI & data, and the hardware and software foundations that support them, Quadbridge helps organizations embed secure, governed, organization-wide AI into daily workflows.

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Melanie Magier

‍Quadbridge+1 226-243-7941

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