Today we’re publishing the CFO AI Market Map, Edition 1 — a companion to the CFO AI Leverage Report inside the Enterprise AI Buying & Budget Index, Open Future Forum’s research program on how executives who hold AI budgets are actually buying and funding AI.
Where the Leverage Report reads the CFO seat itself, the Market Map reads the supply side: a workflow-based map of 64 AI vendors selling into close, FP&A, AP and expense, treasury, audit, procurement, tax, and the agentic/copilot layer — paired with first-party demand signals from 421 application-stage survey responses collected around Open Future Forum executive sessions. We don’t score vendors. We don’t rank them. We show where the supply is crowded, where the buyers actually are, and where the two don’t line up yet.
What’s in it
The clearest signal is that the market has already moved past “should we.” In the finance-stage question, 131 of 185 responses said the team was already running Claude or another AI tool — 71 percent of the base. The harder question now is who proves it. Proving ROI is the single most-named blocker to spending more, at 40 of 76 responses, and 47 of 76 expect a return inside six months. That’s a short clock and a crowded room, and we think it’s the whole sale: pick one workflow, name the owner, show the return inside two quarters.
Sign-off doesn’t run through one desk either. The CEO appears in 36 of 76 sign-off responses, CFO or finance in 20, CIO or CTO in 16. Founders selling in describe an even more scattered buying committee: CIO or CTO leads at 23 of 49, business-unit leaders at 17, CFO or finance itself at just 5. Anyone building or selling into this market is selling to a committee, not a seat.
Why we built this
Vendor lists are everywhere. What’s missing is the demand side: who’s actually deployed, who’s stuck on proof, and who signs when the workflow pays for itself. We’re in the room for that part — we run the dinners where these budget conversations happen off the record.
The Market Map sits alongside the CFO AI Leverage Report as the second release in the Enterprise AI Buying & Budget Index. Each report carries a stable URL so the vendor categories and the demand read can be cited and compared edition to edition.