[Survey on New Business Development in the AI Era] ~80% of organizations face challenges in the Go-to-Market phase; the biggest bottleneck is "collaboration with sales & marketing departments"

Findy Inc. (Headquarters: Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director: Yuichiro Yamada; hereinafter "the Company"), which provides an engineering platform, announced the results of a survey conducted on the challenges in new business development and product planning, as well as the actual utilization of generative AI.

◆Highlights of the Survey Results - **Approximately 80% (79.9%) of organizations face some kind of challenge in the Go-to-Market phase of new businesses.** The biggest bottlenecks were "collaboration and handover with sales/marketing departments is not going well" (34.6%) and "PoC has been completed but the commercialization policy is not determined" (33.1%), showing that challenges regarding cross-organizational collaboration within the company dominated the top responses.

- **Heavy decision-making processes and scattered rationales serve as structural drags.** Over 60% reported that "approvals require two or more levels," "meetings are held twice or more," and "send-backs are normalized." It became clear that about 90% have experienced not being able to find the rationale for past decisions when searching for it.

- **AI adoption rate reached 76.2%, but its contribution to decision-making quality is limited.** AI utilization is centered on routine tasks such as transcribing and summarizing meeting minutes. Even in organizations where AI utilization is standardized company-wide, the percentage of those fully realizing the expected effects remained at 14.1%.

**◾️Survey Overview** Target audience: Business professionals involved in new business development and product planning (New business development, product/service planning & development, R&D planning, IT/DX/AI promotion, product management, UX research/design, etc.) Survey method: Internet survey (Screening -> Main survey) Survey period: March 17 - March 23, 2026 Survey agency: INTAGE Inc. Target industries: Manufacturing, Information and Communication, Wholesale/Retail, Transportation, Consumer Goods Manufacturers Company size: 100 or more employees Valid responses: 622 Survey sponsor: Findy Inc. (*Please note that this survey was not conducted on users of Findy Inc.'s services.)

◆The Reality of Go-to-Market Challenges **◾️About 80% of organizations face walls in the market launch phase. The biggest bottleneck is internal collaboration.** When surveying business professionals involved in new business development and product planning via multiple-choice questions about the challenges they face when bringing a new business or product to market, it became clear that 79.9% of organizations have some kind of issue.

The most common response was "collaboration and handover with sales/marketing departments is not going well" (34.6%), closely followed by "PoC has been completed but the commercialization policy is not determined" (33.1%). Notably, the top two items are not challenges regarding the market environment or customer acquisition, but rather issues related to cross-organizational collaboration within the company. This highlights a dynamic on the frontlines of new business development where the gap between the new business department and the existing sales/marketing departments is deepest, and stagnation in decision-making and cross-organizational collaboration hinders commercialization.