Peril and promise: The high

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series examining the potential risks and benefits as CFOs weave artificial intelligence into company operations.

Pity the CFO today weighing whether to take the risk of channeling record investment into artificial intelligence.

AI promises to yield a monumental return on investment, but in many industries such optimism is not supported by consistent data.

Many employees see gaining AI skills as essential to career growth, while others view the technology as a threat to their employment.

Also, AI generates new tools to boost productivity, spark innovation and build market share, but it also opens a new vulnerability to cyberattack.

The upshot: The challenge of AI adoption tests the flexibility and judgment of a CFO more than other prior technologies, according to technologists and top executives. For a CFO and other C-suite executives, the stakes of AI adoption, the pace of technological change and the intensity of competitive pressure seem so far to be unprecedented, they said.

“What I tell my team is that the technology is improving at a faster rate than the human brain can comprehend,” said Chad Gold, CFO at Fullstory, a behavioral data company.

“You have to constantly be willing to tinker with it and play with it, because it improves so fast” and at a quicker pace than other technologies, Gold said in an interview. “Every other day, it seems like something new is being announced.”

As with prior model-busting technologies, AI adoption challenges a CFO’s ability to mobilize a company from the bottom-up, set consistent key performance indicators and inspire employees to take risks, fail fast and embrace continuous learning, the technologists and CFOs said.

The promise and peril of AI elicits superlative descriptions even from cautious central bankers who usually avoid commenting beyond their congressionally mandated remit of price stability and full employment.

The advent of AI “is perhaps as important a change in the economy and business and households that we've had in my adult lifetime,” Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh said during a June 17 news conference.

AI “is filled with both huge opportunity and with risks,” Warsh said, announcing the creation of a Fed task force to report later this year on the likely impact of the technology on productivity, inflation, employment and economic growth.

CFOs are committing record investment to AI even though its ultimate business value is unclear.

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.

“I don’t know that AI is an innovate-or-die situation for all companies, but it certainly feels that way,” process automation provider Nintex CFO Burt Chao said in an interview.

Nearly three out of four finance teams (72%) use AI for pricing, forecasting, process automation, and risk assessment and management, Protiviti found last year in a global survey of 3,000 workers and 240 executives.

Measurement of the benefits to business from AI is spotty and varies widely across industries, partly because adoption at most companies is at an early stage.

While 88% of organizations use AI in at least one function, only about 1% consider their use of the technology to be mature, according to a McKinsey survey of 1,993 executives in 105 countries in 2025. Roughly two-thirds of surveyed companies have restricted the technology to pilot projects, McKinsey said.

Companies at the vanguard of deploying AI have achieved clear-cut returns. Twenty companies leading in adoption used AI in one to three business processes and lifted their EBITDA by 20% on average, McKinsey said in another study. The cost of AI hit breakeven in one to two years.

Employees who use AI save the equivalent of a working day every week, generating roughly $18,000 in annual value per employee, Protiviti found in its survey.

Senior executives forecast big gains from AI. During the next three years, they expect the technology to, on average, buoy productivity by 1.4%, increase output by 0.8% and trim payrolls by 0.7%, according to a study published in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

During the same timeframe, top U.S. executives anticipate achieving a 2.25% productivity gain from AI, according to the NBER study based on a survey of nearly 6,000 senior executives at companies in the U.K., Germany, Australia and the U.S.

At Nintex, a process automation platform, AI has proven especially useful in budgeting and planning, Chao said.

“When you’ve got a dozen-plus different requests or initiatives, you can take a first cut with the AI as a tool,” he said. “It helps to amalgamate and standardize things.”

Pipedrive, a provider of customer relationship management software, has deployed AI in finance, marketing, customer support, engineering, and research and development, according to company CFO Regi Vengalil.

“My head of accounting built a close-management tool from scratch leveraging AI,” Vengalil said in an interview. “My head of tax, my head of treasury can start taking it into their own hands.”

AI has proven especially valuable in spurring experimentation and innovation, and tearing down barriers to entrepreneurship, according to CFOs and technologists.

Sectors with the highest AI adoption rates have generated the most business applications in recent years, Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Sløk said.

Since 2022, the information and professional and business services sectors logged AI adoption rates exceeding 35% while filing more than 35,000 business applications, Sløk said in a note.

“This idea of one-person companies being $10 million, $20 million, or even $50 million-ARR [annual recurring revenue] companies by themselves — we wouldn’t have talked about that 10 years ago,” Vengalil said. “That’s a unique distinction of the scale of productivity from a single individual” using AI.

At the same time, CFOs and their C-suite colleagues are in danger of falling prey to bated-breath predictions of how AI will transform humankind more profoundly than prior bold technological leaps, including the steam engine, the mainframe computer and the internet, CFOs and technologists said.

“Some observers think AI technologies are unprecedented in the extent to which they will drive rapid transformation in how we work, produce and live,” researchers said in the NBER paper. “That view argues for caution in forming predictions grounded mainly in historical analogies.”

Skepticism is also in order, the researchers said.

“No one — including technologists, AI firms and professional forecasters — possesses the information and expertise needed to independently predict how AI technologies and their effects will play out in all corners of the economy,” they said.

Even with AI still early in its emergence, signs of possible workplace frictions have flared.

CFOs and other executives expect that while adopting AI they will cut payrolls by 0.7% on average over the next three years, researchers said in the NBER paper. The reductions would be equivalent to about 1.75 million jobs across the U.S. and three other countries surveyed, the researchers said.

Despite a string of layoffs attributed to AI, many employees do not see the technology as a threat to job security, anticipating that AI will raise employment 0.5% during the next three years, the researchers said.

Most workers in accounting and finance already use AI tools on a regular basis. Seventy-four percent of finance frontline employees say they use the technology at least several times a week, and 42% report saving a full workday or more per week, Boston Consulting Group found in a survey.

Yet the time savings is not necessarily yielding value, BCG said, citing an annual survey of more than 11,000 employees in 14 countries.

Two out of three frontline employees say they receive little or no guidance on how to use the time freed up by the use of AI, BCG said.

Moreover, employees are not receiving enough training on how to best use AI. Seventy-two percent of employees expect to need major upskilling in AI in the next five years, yet only 36% feel sufficiently trained, BCG said.

In order to seize AI opportunities and avert workplace friction and error, CFOs need to step back and examine the whirlwind of AI adoption before moving forward, technologists and CFOs said.

“If you just go — if you don’t do the crawl, walk, run but just go sprinting off the couch — you’re going to fail,” Chao said.

“A lot of people are doing that because it feels like there’s this pressure that if you don’t embrace AI, you are going to be left behind,” he said. “But if you trip, stumble and fall, you’ll be left behind too.”