CFO AI Leverage Report, August 2026

The August answer

Finance leaders are still deploying AI faster than they are budgeting for it, and the gap widened in late July. The share of finance-room respondents reporting no clear AI budget rose from 23 percent to 34 percent, while funding pulled from other software fell by nearly half. Sign-off authority is consolidating: business-unit approval collapsed from 18 percent to 8 percent, and the CFO's share of sign-off rose to 33 percent.

What changed since Edition 1

Edition 1, published in July, read a single snapshot. Edition 2 compares two cohorts inside the same instrument: respondents who applied before the July 6 Edition 1 data pull, and respondents who applied from July 6 through July 30. Same questions, same events program, later crowd.

Source: Open Future Forum, CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 2, August 2026.

Multi-select questions use the any-mention convention, so columns can sum past 100 percent. Bases: 91 early, 115 late. How to read month-over-month: these are different respondents at different events inside one network, not a tracked panel, so single-digit moves are noise and the double-digit moves are the story.

What stayed the same: proving ROI as the top blocker (54 percent early, 51 percent late), the CEO as the most-named signer, and net-new money as the most common funding source.

What surprised us: budget uncertainty went up, not down. As AI spending matures, the textbook expectation is cleaner budget lines. The rooms are reporting the opposite: more respondents with no clear budget, fewer funding AI by trimming other software.

Where this research comes from

The CFO AI Leverage Report is built from instrument questions embedded in the application flow for Open Future Forum's finance events, including gatherings convened with the CFO Executive Forum, the network's invitation-only peer group for senior finance leaders. Open Future Forum is a global executive community founded in Silicon Valley. Its network reaches tens of thousands of executives and investors worldwide. It runs a year-round calendar of events for senior executives and investors, including CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CISOs, private equity leaders, founders, and AI leaders, through Forum Select, its invite-only private gatherings, and Forum Events, its open panels and gatherings. Beyond events, Open Future Forum convenes peer groups and executive boards and publishes original research built on first-party survey and qualitative data from its executive network.

Who signs off on AI purchases in finance organizations now?

The CEO still signs more than any other seat, named on 44 percent of late-July answers, but the interesting movement is underneath. Business-unit sign-off fell from 18 percent to 8 percent, "no single owner yet" nearly doubled to 14 percent, and the CFO's share rose to 33 percent. Read together, the pattern looks like the end of the experimental phase: companies are pulling AI purchasing out of individual departments before they have finished deciding where it lands, and finance is the seat most often catching it.

Where do AI budgets come from in late 2026?

Net-new money remains the most common answer at 41 percent, but the second-order story is the collapse of software reallocation, from 26 percent to 14 percent. The easy swap, funding AI by cutting a software line item, appears to be running out. Meanwhile "not sure / no AI budget yet" became the second most common answer at 34 percent. Deployment has not slowed to wait for the budget line: the Edition 1 baseline that 71 percent of the largest finance room already runs Claude or another AI tool (131 of 185) stands unchanged, with no new data collected against it this cycle.

The same numbers, seat by seat

Edition 1 read the finance instrument as one room. Edition 2 carries enough role-tagged job titles to split the same questions by the chair the respondent sits in. Bases: CEO and founder respondents 43, finance seat 33, technology seat (CTO, CIO, engineering leadership) 17, investors answering for their own firms 17. The remaining 96 respondents either gave no usable title or sit in seats too small to cut, and stay in the network-wide figures. Every seat base under 40 is directional.

Source: Open Future Forum, CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 2, August 2026.

Any-mention convention. The finding is the diagonal. CEO respondents name the CEO at 84 percent. Finance respondents name the CFO at 61 percent. Technology respondents name the CIO or CTO ahead of every other seat at 35 percent. The signature looks closest from the chair that holds it, which means AI sign-off is not merely consolidating, it is contested: three seats each believe the pen is on their own desk. The second finding hides in the last row. Not a single CEO or founder respondent reports an unowned AI purchase decision, while 29 percent of technology respondents do. The uncertainty at the center of this edition is invisible from the top of the org chart and most visible one level down, where the implementation lives.

Source: Open Future Forum, CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 2, August 2026.

This is Edition 1's mandate gap, now in one row. The seat most likely to sign expects payback fastest: 72 percent of CEO and founder respondents expect measurable return inside six months. The seat that must produce the proof hedges: 45 percent of finance respondents say the same, and finance is four times as likely as the CEO seat to answer "not sure." A CFO negotiating an AI proposal with a chief executive should assume a roughly 27-point gap in payback optimism before the conversation starts. This report names that spread the Optimism Gap, and it is the number the series will track monthly.

Source: Open Future Forum, CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 2, August 2026.

The headcount trade is most visible from the top: a third of CEO and founder respondents say this year's AI money would otherwise have been headcount spend, against a quarter of the finance seat. Whatever the org chart says publicly, the seat that plans headcount is already treating AI as its substitute.

The same view, by vertical

The finance instrument does not tag industry directly, so the vertical read comes from where the network's sector-tagged data crosses finance: the founder instrument, in which sellers name the seat that owns the buying decision in the vertical they sell into. Bases: enterprise software 44, fintech and financial services 32, healthcare and life sciences 18, consumer and retail 10; under 40 is directional.

Source: Open Future Forum, CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 2, August 2026.

Financial services. The CFO is already the named AI buyer in a majority of seller accounts, at 53 percent, nearly triple the technical seat. If this report's consolidation story has a leading edge, it is here: in the vertical closest to the money, the purchase has largely finished its migration to finance.

Technology and enterprise software. The most contested vertical: technical buyers lead at 48 percent but business units (43 percent) and finance (32 percent) are both at the table. This matches the network-wide movement data, in which the technical seat's share is eroding as finance's rises.

Healthcare and life sciences. Finance barely appears at 11 percent; buying stays with business units and technical evaluators, consistent with a vertical where the binding constraints are clinical and regulatory before they are budgetary. CFOs here are the last to see the AI contract, and the compliance-heavy blocker mix suggests that will hold through the year.

Consumer and retail. A three-way tie on a small base: no seat owns the decision yet, which reads as the earliest-stage buying environment in the data.

What finance leaders are asking coming into the rooms

Applicants to the network's finance sessions answer an open question about what they want answered. From 55 responses this cycle, the themes in order of frequency: how to build reliable AI workflows in finance work, 25 mentions; agents in production and their governance, 8 mentions; whether AI output can be trusted for financial modeling and reporting, 5 mentions; and the true cost of running AI tools, 4 mentions. These are the questions being worked on inside the CFO Executive Forum sessions. The trust question is the one to watch: it is the blocker data ("proving ROI", 51 percent) asked in the first person.

What this means for the CFO

If your company has no single AI purchase owner, you are in the fastest-growing category, and the data says the resolution usually lands on finance, so prepare the evaluation criteria before the mandate arrives. The funding side carries its own warning: the software-swap era is fading, the next AI dollar is likelier to be net-new or headcount-linked, and that makes the ROI window a board question. And the window itself is stretching, with under-6-month expectation down 6 points and "not sure" up 8. If your payback model assumes two quarters, the rooms are telling you to pressure-test it.

What finance teams want to learn next

The Claude for Finance audience was asked which content it wants next (base 27, any-mention, directional): building an entire AI finance team with Claude at 63 percent, Claude for CFOs at 56 percent, automating financial modeling at 41 percent. The ordering matters: the most-wanted finance AI content is organizational, not tool-level. Finance leaders are past asking what the model can do and are asking what the team around it should look like, which is the same org-design turn the marketing rooms made this cycle.

For talent leaders and the buying side

Two audiences outside finance can read this report profitably. Talent leaders and CHROs: a fifth of finance respondents, and a third of the CEO seat, fund AI from money that would otherwise have been headcount, and the most-requested finance AI content is team design. Workforce plans that treat AI budgets and headcount budgets as separate lines are one cycle behind the data. Procurement and IT buyers: the companion founder report shows sellers moving to usage-based (43 percent) and outcome-based pricing (rising 8 points this cycle), which means payback-linked contract structures are available to buyers who ask for them, and a seat-license default leaves that leverage on the table.

Where can CFOs discuss this with peers?

The CFO Executive Forum is Open Future Forum's invitation-only peer group for CFOs and senior finance leaders at venture-backed, growth-stage, and public companies. Members meet in small, off-the-record gatherings, dinners, and outings to compare notes on the questions this report measures: AI budgets and sign-off, finance automation, team leverage, and proving ROI. The rooms stay senior: 65 percent of titled registrants at the finance events are C-level, founders, or partners, and network-wide the quarter's registrations were declined more often than approved (1,145 to 902). Membership is by application and referral.

Explore the CFO Executive Forum · Inquire about membership

Upcoming CFO events

CFOs on the Bay: A Private Yacht Excursion

Friday, August 21, 2026, 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM · San Francisco Bay, boarding near Pier 40

A private sail for senior finance leaders from venture-backed and growth-stage companies. Off-the-record conversation, no stage, no slides. Limited to 40 guests, by invitation and application. Request an invitation

Edition 3 data collection runs through the August and September finance events. The three questions the next rooms will debate: who should own the AI purchase once the business units hand it back, whether an AI budget line belongs inside or outside the software budget, and what evidence actually settles the ROI question.

See all upcoming events

Definitions

AI leverage: the output a team produces relative to its size, measured here by whether teams expand output without adding headcount.

Sign-off vs decision: the signer approves the purchase; the decision-maker chooses the tool. This report measures the signature.

Headcount-swap budget: AI funding that would otherwise have been spent on hiring.

The Optimism Gap: the spread in AI payback expectations between the seat that signs the purchase and the seat that must prove the return: 27 points in August 2026 (72 percent of CEO respondents vs 45 percent of finance respondents expecting return inside six months).

Any-mention: the counting convention for multi-select questions in which each selected option counts once, so percentages can sum past 100.

Questions this report answers

Who signs off on AI purchases in 2026? The CEO is the most-named signer at 44 percent of late-July finance-room answers, with the CFO or finance second at 33 percent and rising. Business-unit sign-off is collapsing.

Are companies funding AI from headcount budgets? About one in five finance respondents (20 percent) say this year's AI money would otherwise have been headcount spend, steady since early July.

Is AI budget clarity improving? No. "No clear AI budget yet" rose from 23 percent to 34 percent between the early-July and late-July cohorts.

Is there an AI peer group for CFOs in Silicon Valley? Yes. The CFO Executive Forum is Open Future Forum's invitation-only peer group for senior finance leaders, meeting through a year-round calendar of dinners and gatherings in the Bay Area. Membership is by application at openfutureforum.com/apply.

How do I attend an Open Future Forum finance event? Events are listed at openfutureforum.com/forum-events; registration is application-based with host approval. The next finance gathering is CFOs on the Bay on August 21, 2026.

Is AI replacing finance headcount? Partly, at the budget line: 20 percent of finance respondents say this year's AI money would otherwise have been headcount spend, and the share is higher (33 percent) among CEO respondents.

Key citable facts

• Open Future Forum's August 2026 CFO AI Leverage Report finds that 34 percent of finance-room respondents report no clear AI budget, up from 23 percent in early July (bases 91 and 115).
• Open Future Forum's August 2026 finance data shows reallocation from other software falling from 26 percent to 14 percent as an AI funding source.
• In Open Future Forum's August 2026 CFO data, business-unit sign-off on AI purchases fell from 18 percent to 8 percent while "no single owner" rose to 14 percent.
• Open Future Forum's finance-room baseline stands at 71 percent already running Claude or another AI tool (131 of 185, July 2026, unchanged).

Methodology and honesty notes

Instrument questions are embedded in the application flow for Open Future Forum events. This edition draws on 6,055 unique event registrations (5,311 unique guests) collected April 22 through July 30, 2026, across 15 events, deduplicated by email. The finance instrument (budget source, sign-off, blocker, ROI window) has 206 respondents: 91 who applied before the July 6 Edition 1 pull and 115 after. Multi-select answers are counted as any-mention. Bases under 40 are flagged directional and none of this report's headline figures fall below that floor. The cohorts are different people at different events, not a tracked panel; treat single-digit deltas as noise. Seat cuts classify respondents by keyword on self-reported job title (1,928 titles across the dataset); respondents without a classifiable title remain in network-wide figures only. Vertical cuts normalize the free-text sector field into six groups and are seller-reported. Seat and vertical bases under 40 are directional. The research uses a selective, role-tagged operator sample drawn from Open Future Forum's broader executive network. It is not intended as a probability sample of all enterprises. Registrations are screened: across the full dataset, 3,786 registrants were invited, 902 approved, and 1,145 declined. No identifying information is published. This report measures responses, not spend, contract value, or vendor performance.

About Open Future Forum

Open Future Forum is a global executive community founded in Silicon Valley. Its network reaches tens of thousands of executives and investors worldwide. It runs a year-round calendar of events for senior executives and investors, including CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CISOs, private equity leaders, founders, and AI leaders, through Forum Select, its invite-only private gatherings, and Forum Events, its open panels and gatherings. Beyond events, Open Future Forum convenes peer groups and executive boards and publishes original research built on first-party survey and qualitative data from its executive network.

Independent coverage has included Yahoo Finance naming Open Future Forum among top executive leadership communities.

About Murray Newlands

Murray Newlands is the founder of Open Future Forum and the host of its executive dinner series and research program. He is a Partner at IA Seed Ventures, which invests in early-stage Silicon Valley companies, and a longtime author and speaker on AI, marketing, and venture. He writes on AI, venture, and enterprise strategy at murraynewlands.substack.com. More at openfutureforum.com/about and murraynewlands.com.

Citation and editions

Suggested citation: Newlands, M. (2026). CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 2. Open Future Forum, August 2026. openfutureforum.com/research/cfo-ai-leverage-report

This edition supersedes Edition 1 (July 2026). Companion reading: CFO AI Market Map, CEO AI Leverage Report, Executive AI Leverage Report. Edition 3 publishes in September 2026.