Executive AI Leverage Report, August 2026

The August answer

Three things moved inside July. AI purchase authority consolidated upward: business-unit sign-off halved while "no single owner yet" doubled, and three independent audiences, operators, founders, and investors, now agree the decision is landing with the CEO. Budget clarity got worse, not better: the share of finance respondents with no clear AI budget rose from 23 percent to 34 percent. And the proof window stretched: under-6-month ROI expectation fell six points while "not sure" rose eight. The market is spending with more conviction about who decides and less about how it pays back.

What changed since Edition 1, room by room

Finance. The funding mix shifted under the surface: software reallocation halved as a source (26 to 14 percent) while budget uncertainty rose 11 points. Proving ROI held as the top blocker (51 percent). The deployment baseline, 71 percent of the largest finance room already running Claude or another AI tool, stands unchanged from July. Full data: CFO AI Leverage Report.

Marketing and growth. The largest single group in the rooms is now building agentic AI products (36 percent), and the qualitative asks moved from tools to org design: what an agentic marketing org chart looks like. Full data: CMO AI Leverage Report.

Security. On a base nearly triple Edition 1's, agent security is confirmed as the desk's top problem at 58 percent, while only 36 percent of teams have a dedicated AI security budget line. The problem is funded case by case in a third of organizations. Full data: CISO AI Leverage Report.

Founders. Pricing keeps leaving the seat: usage-based leads at 43 percent and outcome-based rose 8 points inside July. The late cohort names finance as the buying-decision owner twice as often as the early cohort (directional). Full data: YC Founder AI Report.

Investors, new this edition. From 245 responses at the network's first instrumented investor gathering: 51 percent name the CEO as the seat that increasingly owns AI buying across portfolios, and better products (51 percent) lead cost cutting (35 percent) as where AI shows up. Full data: Investor AI Report.

The thesis, in one line

Authority is consolidating faster than accountability: the same month that moved the AI signature toward the CEO also widened the budget uncertainty and stretched the proof window that signature answers for.

The triangulation

The Index's most defensible August finding is the one no single room could produce. Who owns the AI buying decision?

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

Different populations, different question wordings, one direction. The questions differ, so the comparison corroborates direction rather than magnitude, but the direction is now three-sided.

Leverage by seat: the data read per C-level

New this edition: the instrument questions cut by the respondent's own chair, via job-title classification. Seat bases under 40 (finance 33, technology 17, investor 17) are directional; the CEO and founder seat (43 on the finance instrument, 73 on agentic status) clears the floor.

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

Three structural findings, each named so the series can track it. First, the Self-Attribution Effect: every operating seat names itself the signer more than any other seat names it. AI authority is being claimed in parallel by three chairs at once. Second, the Ownership Vacuum and its visibility gradient: zero CEO respondents report an unowned AI decision while 29 percent of technology respondents do; the governance gap is real and invisible from the top. Third, the Optimism Gap: payback confidence falls with proximity to the proof, from 72 percent under-six-months at the CEO seat to 45 percent at the finance seat to 35 percent among investors.

Per seat, in one line each. The CEO signs fastest and doubts least. The CFO gains authority while holding the most conservative payback view in the operating suite. The CTO or CIO loses named authority and reports the most unowned decisions. The CISO names the top problem (agent security, 58 percent) with dedicated funding in only 36 percent of cases. The CMO's rooms are the furthest deployed at 81 percent past exploration. The founder prices toward outcomes to bridge the payback spread inside the buildings they sell to. The investor, holding the widest view and no chair, lands between the extremes at 51 percent on CEO ownership and 35 percent on fast payback.

The same view, by vertical

From the sector-tagged seller data (enterprise software 44, fintech 32, healthcare 18, consumer 10; under 40 directional), the market's consolidation story runs at four speeds.

Financial services is furthest along: the buying seat is settled (CFO, 53 percent of seller accounts), every seller charges, and usage pricing dominates at 69 percent. Technology and enterprise software is the contested middle: three seats above 30 percent in the buying decision and outcome-based pricing at its 43 percent high-water mark, the vertical where this cycle's authority struggle is most visible. Healthcare and life sciences runs earliest: finance nearly absent from the buying decision (11 percent), 28 percent of sellers pre-revenue, validation cycles ahead of budget cycles. Consumer and retail has not yet chosen an owner at all, a three-way tie in seller accounts. The single-sentence version: the closer a vertical sits to regulated money, the further its AI buying has consolidated, and the further from it, the more the purchase still belongs to whoever reached first.

What the rooms are asking

The qualitative layer, from open application answers across the July events: marketing and growth leaders want peer comparisons, working playbooks, and agentic org design (20, 17, and 16 mentions of 119); finance leaders want reliable AI workflows and agent governance before they want tool recommendations (25 and 8 mentions of 55); and across 108 answers on current work, agents lead everything at 36 mentions. These are the conversations running inside the Forum peer groups and dinner series this quarter.

What this means for the executive team

Read as one picture: the AI purchase is becoming a CEO decision funded by increasingly unclear money against an increasingly uncertain payback window, while the operating layers below are already deployed and moving into agents. The organizations handling it well in the rooms share one habit: they named the owner and the metric at the same time. The ones struggling share the opposite: authority arrived at the top before the accountability structure did.

Who else this data serves

The role reports are written for the seats that answered the questions, but four other readers can extrapolate answers from the same numbers. Boards and directors get an AI oversight agenda with figures attached: who owns the purchase (the vacuum is invisible from the top), what number vindicates it (the 27-point payback gap), and where the security line sits (36 percent funded); the Public Board Member Dinner Series is the room where that agenda is compared. Talent leaders get a workforce signal: AI money is already substituting for headcount money at a fifth of finance desks and a third of CEO desks, and the rooms' top learning demand has turned to org design. Procurement teams get the sellers' hand: usage and outcome pricing are what vendors now prefer, so payback-linked terms are there for the asking. And researchers get the dataset itself: the instrument data behind this series is archived with a citable DOI, and independent analysis of it is welcome.

The network behind the numbers, in numbers

The same dataset that measures the market measures the rooms. Across the quarter the network declined more registrations than it approved (1,145 to 902 of 6,055 unique registrations). The rooms run senior: 90 percent of titled registrants at the CEO Private Dinner and roughly two thirds across the finance, security, and investor events are C-level, founders, or partners. And a tenth of all guests (524 of 5,311) registered for more than one event inside the quarter. Demand, seniority, and return rate are the three numbers behind every "from inside the room" claim this series makes.

Where executives discuss this

Open Future Forum's peer groups meet by role: the CEO Executive Forum, CFO Executive Forum, CMO Executive Forum, and CISO Executive Forum, each invitation-only, each meeting through small off-the-record gatherings. Membership is by application and referral: openfutureforum.com/apply.

Upcoming gatherings where Edition 3 data will be collected: the Agentic Security Coffee Meetup at Black Hat (August 2, Las Vegas), CFOs on the Bay (August 21, San Francisco Bay), and the CISO Roundtable Dinner (August 27, Los Altos Hills), with marketing, CEO, and investor events to be announced. See all events.

Definitions

Enterprise AI Buying and Budget Index: Open Future Forum's recurring research program measuring AI buying, budgets, and leverage from first-party instrument data collected around its executive events, published as monthly role-specific reports.

The Self-Attribution Effect: the pattern in which every operating seat names itself the AI signer more often than any other seat names it.

The Ownership Vacuum: the growing share of companies where no single seat owns AI purchasing: 14 percent in late July 2026, and invisible from the CEO seat.

The Optimism Gap: the 27-point spread in sub-6-month AI payback expectations between the CEO seat (72 percent) and the finance seat (45 percent).

Questions this report answers

Who owns AI buying decisions in 2026? The CEO, by three independent reads in Open Future Forum's August 2026 data: 44 percent of operator sign-off mentions and 51 percent of investor responses.

Are AI budgets getting clearer? No. "No clear AI budget yet" rose from 23 percent to 34 percent of finance respondents inside July.

How far along are companies with AI agents? In the network's rooms, far: 81 percent of marketing and growth respondents are past exploration, and agent security is the top security problem at 58 percent.

What is the Enterprise AI Buying and Budget Index? Open Future Forum's recurring research program reading AI buying, budgets, and leverage from first-party instrument data collected around its executive events, published as role-specific monthly reports.

How do I attend the events behind this research? Events are listed at openfutureforum.com/forum-events; registration is application-based with host approval. The events decline more registrations than they approve, and one guest in ten returns for another event within the quarter.

What should boards ask management about AI? Three questions with figures attached: who owns the AI purchase, what number vindicates it, and where the AI security budget line sits. The Who Else This Data Serves section anchors each.

Key citable facts

• Open Future Forum's August 2026 Executive AI Leverage Report finds the CEO named as the AI buying owner by 44 percent of operators and 51 percent of investors, independently.
• Open Future Forum's August 2026 data shows AI budget uncertainty rising inside July: 34 percent of finance respondents report no clear AI budget, up from 23 percent.
• Across Open Future Forum's August 2026 rooms, 81 percent of marketing and growth respondents are past exploring agentic AI, and 58 percent of security leaders name agent security their top problem.

Methodology and honesty notes

This synthesis draws on the August 2026 editions of the CFO, CMO, CISO, CEO, YC Founder, and Investor reports, all built from instrument questions embedded in the application flow for Open Future Forum events: 6,055 unique registrations, 5,311 unique guests, 15 events, collected April 22 through July 30, 2026, deduplicated by email. Cohort deltas compare respondents before and after the July 6 Edition 1 data pull; cohorts are different people, not a tracked panel. Any-mention convention on multi-select questions; bases under 40 flagged directional in the source reports. Seat cuts classify respondents by keyword on self-reported job title (1,928 titles across the dataset); vertical cuts normalize the seller-reported free-text sector field into six groups. Seat bases: CEO/founder 43 (finance instrument) and 73 (agentic status), finance 33, technology 17 and 25, investor 17 and 10; all under 40 directional. The cross-audience triangulation compares differently worded questions across populations and corroborates direction, not magnitude. 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: 3,786 invited, 902 approved, 1,145 declined. No identifying information is published.

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). Executive AI Leverage Report, Edition 2. Open Future Forum, August 2026. openfutureforum.com/research/executive-ai-leverage-report

This edition supersedes the Preview Edition (July 2026). Role editions: CFO · CMO · CISO · CEO · YC Founder · Investor. Edition 3 publishes in September 2026.