MIT SMR–TOTVS Study Finds 80% of Brazilian Firms Use AI, Only 7% at the Core
Eighty percent of Brazilian organisations already test or use artificial intelligence in some form, but only 7 percent have moved the technology to the centre of the business, Forbes Brasil reported on October 15, citing a MIT Sloan Management Review Brasil study commissioned by TOTVS and fielded among 583 professionals. The rest leave AI in pilots, departmental experiments or partial rollouts that never touch core processes.
Forty percent of companies run initiatives with no cross-department coordination. Eighty-six percent do not measure how much they spend on AI, and 88 percent cannot state the financial return. Average maturity scored 6.69 out of 10, with technology integration the weakest pillar: only 46 percent say AI tools automatically reach company data, and just 8 percent integrate AI broadly into ERP systems—the layer TOTVS argues is decisive.
People and rules lag too. Forty-three percent of professionals fear errors from over-trusting AI and 37 percent say they do not know how to use the tools, yet only 7 percent of firms offer structured training for all staff. Formal organisation-wide AI governance exists in just 14 percent of companies, while 46 percent name data leakage or misuse as their top AI risk.
What it means in practice
Boardrooms chasing maturity will collide with public-sector templates such as Rio’s statewide AI policy with an ethics committee and public forum and education rules like MEC’s homologation of CNE AI rules for teacher-led essay marking help. Privacy sandboxes such as the ANPD sandbox report on AI and data-protection tests show regulators already expect measured, governed deployments rather than shadow pilots.
CEOs should demand ERP-linked use cases with cost and ROI dashboards before approving another chatbot. Vendors that only sell isolated copilots will struggle against integrators that wire AI into billing, inventory and compliance.
What to watch: whether TOTVS and peers publish case studies of the 7 percent, if ANPD guidance hardens governance expectations for private firms, and whether 2027 budgets shift from tool licences to data-integration projects.