Catenaa, Saturday, October 03, 2026- Over six out of 10 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) say their responsibilities have expanded to include AI technology strategy.
According to a survey IBM conducted among 1,500 CFOs, more and more CFOs have expanded their traditional strategy planning to include enterprise technology and artificial intelligence strategy.
Senior Vice President of IBM Consulting Neil Dhar said that as AI becomes more important to businesses, CEOs are increasingly leaning on their CFOs to help decide where and how to invest.
“AI is expensive, and it’s a capital allocation issue: where and how do you allocate, when do you turn it off, and when do you add more money?” Dhar said in an interview, according to IBM’s CFO Dive Newsletter. “As you get into capital allocation and return on investment, the CFO is obviously going to play a critical role.”
Meanwhile, a separate Deloitte report said that 54% of CFOs take charge of cross-enterprise AI and technology capital allocation, while 48% oversee AI and technology spending and cost controls.
The report also found that more than two-thirds of respondents who have taken on these responsibilities did so within the past three years.
Also, 66% of Deloitte respondents said that they use internally driven processes and measurements to approve large AI and technology investments.
According to IBM, despite growing AI adoption, relatively few finance organizations have fully redesigned their operations around it.
The IBM survey also found that finance is developing AI capabilities faster than it is redesigning workflows, as only 6% of finance organizations said they are transformation-ready, with AI consistently embedded into workflows and decision-making at enterprise scale.
IBM said “AI-first CFOs” go beyond technology upgrades to redesign how finance operates, so intelligence can scale across workflows and decision processes.
IBM said companies with AI-First CFOs reported revenue growth 23% higher than peer organizations from 2022 to 2024.
The report said that in AI-first finance organizations, capital allocation follows value signals continuously rather than being tied to planning cycles, annual budgets, or periodic approvals.
“The best companies drive AI in a way that they see meaningful results in three-to six-month intervals, either revenue expansion or margin improvement, and then reinvest back into the business,” Dhar said, according to the IBM report.
