Standalone operator-research reports reading how executives buy, fund, and get leverage from AI — from inside the room, lane by lane.
Open Future Forum runs its operator-research from the same rooms. The Enterprise AI Buying & Budget Index reads the money in the CFO lane: who signs, where the budget comes from, what blocks the next dollar. The CMO AI Leverage Report and the CISO AI Leverage Report are standalone companions reading the same buying-and-budget question in the marketing and security lanes. The CEO AI Leverage Report reads the seat every function reports to: the signature, the mandate gap, and the distance between the decision and the proof. The Executive AI Leverage Report reads something else: the leverage itself, what it looks like when an executive actually has it, and how it was built. The AI Transformation Report reads across every lane at once: how far AI has actually moved from pilots into the way functions run, on four markers, spend, headcount, work, and governance. The CFO AI Market Map, the CMO AI Market Map, and the CISO AI Market Map read the supply side of the CFO, CMO, and CISO lanes: workflow-based maps of the vendors selling into finance, marketing, and security, paired with the same first-party demand signals. The YC Founder AI Report reads the supply side from the founders themselves: who they believe buys their AI and how they charge, with the Founder AI Pricing Index as its flagship. The VC & CVC AI Investment Report reads the capital side: how venture and corporate venture investors are backing AI and reading portfolio adoption, with the AI Investor Conviction Index as its flagship. The Investor AI Report reads the buying decision from across whole investor portfolios, and the Executive AI Statistics page carries every published number in citable form. None of the twelve size the AI market from above. All twelve read from inside the room: the executives, founders, and investors who actually hold AI budgets, build AI, fund AI, and use AI daily, answering in their own words.
Every figure states its response base. No headline is published below 40 responses. Early reads are labeled as directional. A smaller claim, fully backed, beats a larger one that invites the obvious critique.
The annual flagship of the Enterprise AI Buying and Budget Index. Ten headline claims from the year’s most-cited AI research, BCG, MIT, PwC, Gartner, a16z, McKinsey, S&P Global, Menlo Ventures, KPMG, and OECD, tested one at a time against first-party data from 6,055 executive registrations, with a verdict on each: corroborated, contradicted, or complicated. Who owns AI, what it returned, and where the budgets went.
A new vantage point in the Enterprise AI Buying and Budget Index: investors reading AI across entire portfolios rather than single companies. From 245 responses at the network’s first instrumented investor gathering: 51 percent name the CEO as the seat that increasingly owns AI buying, better products lead cost cutting at 51 to 35 percent as where AI shows up, and 16 percent of portfolios show nothing measurable yet. Edition 1 is the baseline the series will track.
Every number the August 2026 editions published, in citable form: budgets, sign-off, ROI expectations, agentic adoption, security, pricing, and portfolios, each statistic with its base and a link to its source report. Built for citation, archived with a permanent DOI.
The capital side, read from the investors themselves: how venture and corporate venture investors are backing AI and reading it inside their portfolios. The flagship metric is the AI Investor Conviction Index — 86 percent in Edition 1, the share of investors who name at least one place AI already makes a measurable difference (base 237). Investors name the CEO as the rising owner of the AI buying decision at 51 percent (base 245), yet 22 percent still cannot say who owns it: conviction is running ahead of the operating model that governs it. Set against the external record, AI took 61 percent of global venture capital in 2025 while 95 percent of enterprise pilots still show no measured profit.
The supply side, one month on: usage-based pricing leads at 43 percent, outcome-based rose 8 points inside July, and CFO mentions as the buying owner doubled (directional) as sign-off consolidates toward the money. New vertical playbooks: fintech prices by usage and sells to finance; enterprise software is the outcome-pricing lab; healthcare is the earliest market. Independent research; not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator.
A companion to the CISO AI Leverage Report reading the supply side: a workflow-based map of 63 security AI vendors across agent and model security, AI SOC, identity and access, cloud exposure, application security, data security, GRC, and security automation — paired with first-party demand signals from 79 application-stage survey responses. No scores, no rankings: agent access is the clearest demand signal, and funding is real but uneven.
A companion to the CMO AI Leverage Report reading the supply side: a workflow-based map of 64 marketing AI vendors across content, creative, campaigns, SEO/GEO/AEO, analytics and attribution, lifecycle, social, and the agentic/copilot layer — paired with first-party demand signals from 55 application-stage survey responses. No scores, no rankings: marketing buyers are already piloting or running agents, and what they asked for was proof, not more AI.
A companion to the CFO AI Leverage Report reading the supply side: a workflow-based map of 64 finance AI vendors across 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. No scores, no rankings: where the supply is crowded, where the buyers are, and where the two don’t line up yet.
The CEO’s position in AI decisions, now confirmed from three sides: operators name the CEO the most-frequent signer at 44 percent, investors put the CEO at 51 percent across portfolios, and every operating seat over-names itself, a pattern the report names the Self-Attribution Effect. Business-unit sign-off halved inside July while unowned decisions doubled to 14 percent: the Ownership Vacuum, invisible from the top of the org chart.
Innovation budgets fell from 25 percent to 7 percent of enterprise AI spend in a year, yet only 7 percent of firms have fully scaled AI. This cross-lane report reads that transformation gap from inside the room: deployment is real, but funding is still mostly net-new, governance is funded case by case, and the sign-off seat sits far from the work. The flagship metric is the AI Transformation Index, tracking the last transition on the report's own four-stage curve: exploring, piloting, deployed, embedded.
What senior security leaders name as their AI problem and how AI security is funded, from 45 responses, nearly triple the Edition 1 base: 58 percent name securing AI agents and their access as the top problem, more than twice shadow AI at 27 percent, while only 36 percent hold a dedicated AI security budget line and a third fund the work case by case. The top two problems are governance problems, not adversary problems.
Where marketing and growth leaders actually are with agentic AI, from 230 responses: 81 percent are past exploration, the largest single group is building agentic products, and org design has overtaken measurement as the question the rooms bring to peer sessions. The function is restructuring, not experimenting.
The flagship synthesis of the Enterprise AI Buying and Budget Index: what moved across the finance, marketing, security, founder, and investor rooms in 30 days, read from 6,055 registrations and 5,311 unique guests. The August thesis: authority is consolidating faster than accountability, measured through the Self-Attribution Effect, the Ownership Vacuum, and the 27-point Optimism Gap.
How finance leaders are funding, approving, and getting leverage from AI, from 206 application-stage responses. The August read: budget uncertainty rose, not fell, with 34 percent reporting no clear AI budget, software reallocation halved as a funding source, and the CFO’s sign-off share climbed to 33 percent. New this edition: the 27-point Optimism Gap between the CEO seat and the finance seat on AI payback.
Direct, sourced answers to the questions executives ask most, each drawn from the reports above.
Looking for the full source library, including third-party industry research? Browse our open GitHub archive or cite it via its permanent Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21576019 It is also permanently archived on Software Heritage.
The Executive AI Leverage Report's Edition 1 ships once its flagship reading clears the program's response floor. Each report carries a stable URL under /research/ and a dated edition number. Prior editions remain published so each line can be tracked over time.