Every function is being asked the same question this year: is AI actually changing how you work, or did you just buy some tools. This is our short list of the reports that help answer it, what each covers, and who should read it.

1. The AI Transformation Report (Open Future Forum)

The AI Transformation Report is Open Future Forum's cross-lane operator-research report, reading how far executives have actually moved AI from pilots into the way their functions run. It draws on application records across twelve Open Future Forum events and a direct instrument fielded across the finance, security, growth, founder, and investor rooms.

Its distinction from the adoption surveys is the four markers it reads together: where the AI budget comes from, whether output is decoupling from headcount, whether whole units of work have been handed over, and whether governance has caught up to deployment. The lead finding is the transformation gap: 71 percent of the largest finance room already runs an AI tool, but the funding, governance, and sign-off markers all lag behind that deployment. It reads alongside the CFO, CMO, and CISO AI Leverage Reports and the Executive AI Leverage Report as standalone companions in the same research program.

Who should read it: operating executives who want to know whether their own function has actually transformed or just adopted, and board members who need a diagnostic sharper than an adoption percentage.

Open Future Forum is a private executive community in Silicon Valley, founded in 2019, with 100 events to date. It runs Forum Select, invite-only private events for C-suite executives, and Forum Events, open panels and gatherings.

2. McKinsey's The State of AI in 2025: Agents, Innovation, and Transformation

McKinsey's flagship annual survey is the benchmark for the scaling gap. The November 2025 edition found 88 percent of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, up from 78 percent the year before, but only 7 percent have fully scaled it. Just 39 percent of respondents attribute any enterprise-level EBIT impact to AI at all, and most of those put the number below 5 percent. McKinsey's own definition of an AI high performer, 5 percent or more EBIT impact plus reported significant value, captures only about 6 percent of respondents.

Who should read it: any executive who needs the external number for "how rare is full-scale transformation, really." Seven percent is the number your board has probably already seen.

3. MIT's The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025

MIT Project NANDA's report is the source of the statistic that reframed the AI conversation in 2025: roughly 95 percent of enterprise generative AI pilots produced no measurable profit-and-loss impact. It is the empirical backbone of the "pilot purgatory" narrative, and it pairs with S&P Global's finding that the share of companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives jumped from 17 to 42 percent in a year.

Read it as the counterweight to every AI vendor's growth chart. Spend can rise and impact can stay flat at the same time, and this is the report with the receipts.

Who should read it: anyone who needs to pressure-test an AI budget request, and anyone who has been asked to explain why last year's pilots didn't show up on the P&L.

4. BCG's AI Radar 2026: As AI Investments Surge, CEOs Take the Lead

BCG's January 2026 survey of 2,360 executives across 16 markets, including 640 CEOs, is the read on who is actually deciding. Seventy-two percent of CEOs now call themselves the main AI decision-maker, double the share a year earlier, and corporations expect to roughly double AI spending in 2026, from 0.8 to about 1.7 percent of revenue. Half of CEOs believe their job is on the line if AI does not pay off, and BCG sorts them into three archetypes: Trailblazers, Pragmatists, and Followers, by roughly 15/70/15 percent.

Who should read it: anyone reporting to a CEO on AI this year. It tells you which of the three archetypes you are walking into the room with.

5. KPMG's AI Quarterly Pulse Survey

KPMG's quarterly survey is the closest thing to a running tracker of enterprise AI agent deployment, and its most recent editions center on the governance question this whole list keeps returning to: cost visibility. Agent deployment among large US organizations climbed from roughly 11 percent in early 2025 to the low 50s by mid-2026, even as orchestration of multiple agents across workflows doubled. But only 26 percent of organizations report full, real-time visibility into what their AI systems cost to run, and KPMG finds leaders with strong cost visibility are five times more likely to achieve ROI.

Who should read it: CFOs and CISOs specifically. It is the quarterly gut-check on whether deployment is outrunning the ability to account for it.

How to Use These Reports Together

Start with the AI Transformation Report for a peer-level view of whether your own function has actually transformed, on the four markers that matter. Use McKinsey to benchmark how rare full-scale transformation still is externally. Use MIT to keep the pilot-failure evidence in view whenever a vendor's growth chart gets ahead of itself. Use BCG to read the CEO in the room. Use KPMG every quarter to check whether cost visibility is keeping pace with agent deployment.

The pattern across all five is the same one this report measures: adoption is no longer the question, and hasn't been for a while. The executives pulling ahead in 2026 are the ones who can show, on a specific marker, that AI changed how the function runs rather than just what tools it has open.

That is the conversation Open Future Forum was built for. If you are a senior executive and want to compare notes with peers off the record, openfutureforum.com is the place to start.

Read the AI Transformation Report →

Open Future Forum is a private executive community in Silicon Valley founded in 2019, with 100 events to date across Forum Select private events and Forum Events open programming. Its research program, including the AI Transformation Report, the CFO, CMO, and CISO AI Leverage Reports, and the Executive AI Leverage Report, is built on first-party data from executives attending Open Future Forum events.