Open Future Forum released the first edition of the AI Transformation Report this week. It is a standalone report, cross-lane by design, and a companion to the CFO, CMO, and CISO AI Leverage Reports and the Executive AI Leverage Report. Edition 1 is now live.
I built this report because every room was telling us the same thing in a different accent. Finance said the tools are in. Security said the budget for governing them is not. Growth said agents are already running production work. Nobody had put those three answers next to each other and asked whether they described the same company at the same moment. They do, and the distance between them is what this report measures.
What the Report Covers
The AI Transformation Report tracks how far AI has actually moved from pilots into the way a function runs, on four markers, not one. It looks at four things.
One. Where the AI budget comes from: net-new money, money reallocated from other software, or money that would have gone to a hire. That is the spend marker.
Two. Whether output is starting to decouple from headcount, or whether teams are just doing more with the same plan they already had.
Three. Whether whole units of work have been handed to AI, not just assisted by it. We read this across the finance, security, and growth rooms, and the growth room is furthest along.
Four. Whether governance has caught up to deployment. In the security room, it has not: 69 percent govern AI agents with no dedicated budget line.
Why This Report, Now
Enterprises spent $37 billion on generative AI in 2025, a 3.2x rise in a year (Menlo Ventures), and innovation budgets collapsed from 25 percent to 7 percent of AI spend as the money moved into core lines (a16z). That is the adoption story, and it is real. But McKinsey finds only 7 percent of firms have fully scaled AI, and MIT found roughly 95 percent of enterprise generative AI pilots produced no measurable profit-and-loss impact. Adoption and transformation are not the same curve, and most of the market is confusing one for the other.
Our own rooms show the gap from the inside rather than the outside. That is the difference between this report and the adoption surveys: we read the same operators, across editions, on the specific markers, spend source, headcount posture, handed-over work, governance, that separate a company that bought AI from a company AI has actually changed.
How the Data Was Built
The AI Transformation Report draws on application records across twelve Open Future Forum events in our July 2026 data pull, spanning the finance, security, growth, founder, and investor rooms, plus a direct instrument fielded in the application flow. Open Future Forum is a private executive community founded in 2019 with more than 100 events to date, running Forum Select, our invite-only C-suite dinners, and Forum Events, our open panels and gatherings.
This edition also introduces a new framework: the Transformation Curve, four stages, exploring, piloting, deployed, embedded, defined here for the first time and carried forward as the frame later editions track. Each lane in our network sits at a different point on it, and the report reads all of them against the same curve.
A Few Numbers from Edition 1
The report leads with its flagship metric, the AI Transformation Index, which has not yet been fielded. Until it clears the 40-response floor, we report the closest proxy: 71 percent of the largest finance room already runs Claude or another AI tool, 22 percent are evaluating, and 8 percent have not started, base 185. That is the deployment baseline, and it is the seed series the Index will be measured against.
The funding read is the sharpest evidence of the gap. Forty-six percent of the finance rooms fund this year's AI budget mostly with net-new money, 24 percent with money reallocated from other software, and 17 percent with money that would have gone to headcount, base 87. One in six has already started harvesting; most have not.
And the seat gap holds across the whole network. Inside companies, the CEO signs 47 percent of new AI purchases. Outside, the founders selling in target the CIO or CTO at 43 percent, more than any other seat. The seat that approves the spend and the seat the market is actually selling to are not the same chair.
Read the full AI Transformation Report →
What Comes Next
This is Edition 1, and it sets the baseline rather than the answer. The flagship AI Transformation Index question, along with supporting metrics on headcount posture, process readiness, and governance, enters the field at upcoming Open Future Forum events across every lane. The next edition reports the Index on its own responses, overall and by lane, against the seed series printed here. If you want to compare your own transformation stage against the curve, reach out through Open Future Forum.
Read the full AI Transformation Report →