The CFO and Executive AI Reports Worth Reading in 2026
I publish two of the reports on this list, so read it with that bias in plain sight. I am not neutral. But I read all of this research for a living, I sit with the finance and executive leaders it describes most weeks, and the question I keep getting is the same one: with every research house now publishing an AI report, which ones are actually worth an executive's time?
Here is my honest read, what each report measures, and who should read it.
Why this matters more in 2026
The reason to read any of these reports changed this year. Enterprise generative AI spending reached roughly $37 billion in 2025, more than triple the year before, according to Menlo Ventures. Andreessen Horowitz tracked the share of that spend funded from experimental innovation budgets collapsing from 25 percent to 7 percent in a single year. When AI moves from the innovation lab to the operating budget, it becomes a board question with a finance owner. The reports below are how boards, CFOs, and CEOs calibrate their own numbers against everyone else's.
The big analyst houses: the macro view
Deloitte CFO Signals is the establishment benchmark. The Q4 spotlight surveyed 200 CFOs at North American companies with at least $1 billion in revenue and found digital transformation had overtaken enterprise risk management as the top priority for 2026, with 87 percent of large-company CFOs expecting AI to be very or extremely important to their finance operations this year. Read it if you run finance at a large enterprise and want to know what your direct peers told a survey.
Deloitte Finance Trends 2026 is the companion piece, finding 63 percent of finance departments actively using AI solutions. Together the two give you the most statistically solid picture of large-company finance sentiment available.
Bain's 2026 survey of finance leaders carries the most striking spending numbers: 83 percent of CFOs plan to raise enterprise AI investment by more than 15 percent over the next two years, and 42 percent plan increases above 30 percent. Bain also found only about a third of finance leaders rate their AI outcomes as strongly positive, and that satisfaction climbs sharply only where AI is deployed at scale rather than left in pilots. That gap between spending intent and satisfaction is, to me, the single most important finding in any of these reports.
Gartner's finance research is where to look for the workforce question. Gartner has finance headcount growth expectations falling from 6 percent in 2025 to 2 percent in 2026, which is the quiet number behind every AI budget conversation. Grant Thornton's CFO survey recorded the highest technology-spending intent in the 21 quarters it has run the survey, useful as a mid-market counterpoint to the large-cap houses.
The global surveys: the widest lens
Wolters Kluwer's Future Ready CFO Report 2026 is the biggest sample on this list, 1,672 senior finance leaders across more than 20 markets. Nearly half identify AI adoption as the most impactful global trend, ahead of interest rates and regulation, and 87 percent say expectations of the CFO are expanding as AI embeds into enterprise decision-making. It also carries a sobering maturity check: 69 percent of finance teams describe themselves as early or established in digital maturity, and only 18 percent as digitally advanced. Read it if you want the global picture rather than the Silicon Valley one.
The community-produced research
CFO Connect's State of AI in Finance 2026, produced with Oracle NetSuite, Remote, and Spendesk, is the best practitioner-level read. It finds 56 percent of finance leaders now using AI, double the 2023 rate, yet finance still ranking last among business functions in AI deployment, with 68 percent of CFOs saying they have been slow to adopt because they do not know where to start. It is also the most concrete on tooling and includes real operating detail, like OpenAI's internal finance team running at roughly 22 percent of the headcount of comparable firms. Read it if you want use cases rather than sentiment.
Where our research fits: the operator-level benchmark
The reports above measure from the top down, through survey panels and client bases, and they do it well. What none of them measure is the room-level view: who actually holds the pen on an AI purchase, and whether the spend converts into leverage. That is the gap the Open Future Forum research program exists to fill, and I will be direct about both what it offers and what it does not.
The CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 1 of the Enterprise AI Buying & Budget Index, is built from Open Future Forum's executive communities: more than 20 events in 2026, over 200 executive registrations, including more than 60 finance leaders. Its early signal: around three in five finance leaders said the CFO or finance organization signs off on AI purchases. It introduces the CFO AI Leverage Index, tracking whether AI lets finance teams grow output without growing the team. The sample is intentionally small and the report says so on its face. What it offers that the panel surveys cannot is first-party, operator-level data, tracked edition over edition, published free. Read it here: openfutureforum.com/research/cfo-ai-leverage-report.
The Executive AI Leverage Report, Preview Edition, extends the method beyond finance, built from 421 survey responses across seven Open Future Forum events. It introduces the Executive AI Leverage Ladder, from productivity to capability to context, and a finding we call the seat gap: inside companies the CEO is the most named signer of AI purchases, while the founders selling in target the CIO and the business unit and barely see finance at all. If you sell enterprise AI, that mismatch is the most actionable finding on this page. Read it here: openfutureforum.com/research/executive-ai-leverage-report.
How to choose
If you run finance at a $1 billion-plus company, start with Deloitte and Bain. If you want the global view, Wolters Kluwer. If you want tools and use cases, CFO Connect. If you want to know who actually signs, how buyers and sellers mis-target each other, and how operator sentiment moves quarter to quarter, that is what the Enterprise AI Buying & Budget Index measures, and it is free.
The honest close: the best research diet is one macro report, one practitioner report, and one operator benchmark. No single source on this list, including mine, gives you all three.
All Open Future Forum editions live at openfutureforum.com/research.
Murray Newlands is the founder of Open Future Forum and a Partner at IA Seed Ventures. Open Future Forum is a Silicon Valley executive community founded in 2019 that runs invitation-only dinners for C-suite leaders and open panel events for the AI and tech community. He writes Murray's Newsletter on Substack.
