Dive Brief:
- Although 77% of finance organizations have deployed artificial intelligence, only 35% of them can confidently gauge the return on their investment, Protiviti found in a worldwide survey.
- Measuring ROI is just one big AI challenge: Finance leaders for the third straight year identified ensuring data security and privacy as their top priority, according to Christopher Wright, head of CFO solutions and business performance improvement at Protiviti.
- “Organizations cannot scale AI without confidence in the quality, security and governance of their data,” Wright said in a statement. “That is the major reason why cybersecurity and data governance remain finance’s top priorities.”
Dive Insight:
The finance and information sectors are most vulnerable to AI-weaponized cyberattacks and four other AI risks posing the highest likelihood of causing the most harm to society by 2030, according to a survey of 272 AI experts worldwide by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Queensland.
AI is especially powerful in recognizing patterns, generating code and synthesizing information, making it a prime weapon for cyberstrikes, according to the MIT/Queensland study.
When adopting AI, CFOs and other finance leaders need to prioritize cybersecurity, along with data governance, access controls, model oversight and privacy safeguards, Protiviti said.
Such detailed technical work is challenging amid a pell-mell corporate rush to AI.
Worldwide spending on AI will surge 47% this year to $2.6 trillion from $1.76 trillion in 2025, according to Gartner, exceeding the gross domestic product of both Canada and Australia. By 2030, AI investment will rise 120% more to $5.62 trillion.
Only 14% of finance organizations are deploying AI based on a detailed strategy, Protiviti found in its survey of 902 finance leaders.
Also, only 7% of CFOs and top finance executives say their organization focuses more on AI governance than speed of adoption, and 92% feel pressure to show that investment in the technology yields a decent return, Avalara found in a survey. Avalara is a provider of AI tax compliance software.
Among finance organizations, AI use for financial forecasting surged to 76% this year from 58% in 2025, making the task the No. 1 use case, Protiviti said.
With AI, finance teams can analyze larger data sets, perform more scenario planning and more quickly provide company leadership with insights, according to Protiviti.
Also, 67% of finance organizations are using AI-powered analytics to identify, measure and reduce financial risks more proactively, Protiviti found in the survey. Fifty-six percent of finance teams use AI to streamline repetitive tasks with the aim of reducing errors and increasing efficiency.
Measuring the ROI of AI “requires some unique approaches to the ‘R’ and the ‘I,’” Wright said in an email response to questions.
“The ‘I’ involves time, third party expenses and cost tracking,” he said, but “the ‘tokenomics’ has become a factor as organizations try to make sure they have a handle on who is paying for token usage on Copilot, Claude, etc.,” he said. “So there’s slightly less confidence in the ‘I.’”
The “R” in the ROI can be measured in improved accuracy and time or money saved, he said.
“But where AI improves a user experience, or results in more employee satisfaction in the finance department, that’s less objectively measurable,” Wright said.
Many CFOs do not attempt to justify AI spending on a standard ROI basis, he said.
CFOs are “mindful of the need to establish expectations up front so that measurement of success can have some rigor,” Wright said. “And they’re working, in real time, on ways to develop ROI approaches that satisfy them enough to support investment requests.”
