Dive Brief:
- Sixty percent of finance leaders expect artificial intelligence costs and technical complexity to rise substantially through 2027, according to a recent Deloitte report.
- Those respondents also say they will need to adopt more sophisticated AI cost-management practices. In contrast, 35% plan to maintain their current practices because they expect AI costs and technical complexity to remain modest.
- “AI costs can be difficult to manage and predict,” the report said. “Token consumption may be the most visible usage metric, but other factors, such as workload type, data center capacity, and hosting strategy can affect the cost of generating and scaling AI outputs in nonlinear and potentially volatile ways.”
Dive Insight:
Deloitte identified several challenges that can make AI costs harder for finance teams to track and manage. They include uncertainty around regulatory and compliance requirements, complex cloud and vendor billing for AI computing, and difficulty integrating AI usage data with enterprise resource planning and finance systems.
When asked how they most often approve large AI and technology investments, 66% of respondents said they use an internally driven process that puts measurement at the forefront.
Among those respondents, 27% primarily rely on a “stage-gate” process, in which funding starts with a pilot and additional funding may be added if goals are met at each stage. Another 25% have a formal capital approval process that requires quantified return on investment and a business case.
But roughly a quarter of respondents said company mandates from either the C-suite or board drive most of their organization’s tech investment decisions with no process used to gauge projects’ values.
The findings show that finance is playing a major role in technology decisions. Fifty-four percent of finance leaders said they are leading enterprise AI and technology capital-allocation decisions, while 48% oversee AI and technology spending and cost controls, according to Deloitte.
“The CFO mandate is expanding from financial stewardship to helping shape how the enterprise invests in, governs and creates value from AI and technology,” Ed Hardy, U.S. finance services leader at Deloitte, said in a press release on the findings.
The Deloitte survey included 1,434 finance leaders, including CFOs and executives one level below the CFO, at companies with annual revenue of at least $1 billion across 26 countries.
