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CFO AI Leverage Report

Publisher: Open Future Forum Research type: Executive benchmark report (Enterprise AI Buying & Budget Index, CFO lane) Audience: CFOs, VPs of Finance, controllers, and finance operators Edition: Edition 1 Publication date: June 2026 Canonical source: https://openfutureforum.com/research/cfo-ai-leverage-report

Overview

The CFO AI Leverage Report is the first edition of Open Future Forum's Enterprise AI Buying & Budget Index, a recurring research program reading how the executives who control AI budgets are buying and funding AI, function by function. This edition focuses on finance: whether AI is letting finance teams grow output without growing headcount, and who actually signs off on AI purchases inside the finance function. The report's flagship metric is the CFO AI Leverage Index, which tracks the share of finance leaders who say AI now lets them do more without adding staff.

Methodology & Sample

The report combines two kinds of first-party data. Demand and audience composition figures are drawn from Open Future Forum event registration records across more than 20 events in 2026, totaling over 200 executive registrations, reported as conservative rounded floors of distinct registrants rather than opinion survey results. Opinion data (including the flagship Leverage Index) comes from a direct instrument fielded to finance-leader registrants at Open Future Forum events. Open Future Forum's stated policy is not to publish any headline figure below a base of 40 responses; early reads below that floor in this edition are explicitly labeled directional, with the response base shown alongside each figure.

Key Findings

  • Finance and cybersecurity were the two deepest operating-executive lanes in Open Future Forum's 2026 event calendar, each sustained across a series of events rather than a single spike.
  • The best-attended finance session of the year was framed specifically around growing a finance team's output without adding headcount, outperforming general CFO programming.
  • In an early, small-sample read (5 respondents at one event), a majority of finance leaders pointed to the CFO or finance function, rather than the CEO or IT, as the seat that signs off on AI purchases.
  • Across 16 AI founders surveyed at Open Future Forum founder events, none named finance as their primary enterprise buyer; founders instead pointed to IT and business-unit leaders, while pricing increasingly on usage or outcomes rather than per seat.
  • The report cross-references external benchmarks (Menlo Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, BCG, Gartner, MarketsandMarkets, and others) to contextualize its first-party reads against broader enterprise AI spending trends, including the shift of AI spend from experimental innovation budgets into core budget lines.
  • The report is transparent about its limitations: it is drawn from a self-selected Open Future Forum community sample rather than a probability sample of all enterprises, and it explicitly separates its own first-party findings from third-party benchmark figures used for context.

Related OFF Research

Citation

Open Future Forum. The CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 1. June 2026. https://openfutureforum.com/research/cfo-ai-leverage-report

DOI

Not yet assigned.