Birmingham, Mich. – October 13, 2026 -- Only 14% of Finance leaders say their AI investments have delivered "enterprise value and decision impact," even though 74% now use AI to reduce manual work, according to OneStream's inaugural Forward Finance Index.
The survey covers 1,300 CFOs and equivalent Finance leaders at mid-market ($500M-$999.9M revenue) and enterprise ($1B-$10B+ revenue) organizations in the U.S., U.K., and France. It benchmarks them across five areas: AI strategy, data, workforce, operations, and IT collaboration.
Only 6% of Finance organizations lead across all five areas
More than half (52%) rank as "Followers," held back by data they cannot fully trust, AI without measurable ROI, limited visibility into operational decisions, disconnected IT roadmaps, and an unprepared workforce. Four in ten executives say data quality issues regularly block or delay AI projects.
Organizations were scored on five equally weighted dimensions and placed in four tiers: Leaders, Advancers, Adopters, and Followers.
Confidence in data outruns transparency by 31 points
While 71% of executives are confident in their team's ability to deliver trusted data and insight, just 40% classify financial reporting data as fully transparent, meaning it can be traced, explained, and validated.
Other gaps between intent and execution:
- 73% of Finance teams proactively suggest efficiencies to business units, but only 17% rate their early-warning and risk-identification capabilities as "leading."
- 71% see Finance and IT as strategic partners, yet only 15% have a fully integrated joint roadmap with shared KPIs and accountability.
- Only 15% have a fully embedded AI skills program, while 66% believe failing to prepare their workforce will make their organization irrelevant within five years.
Finance-led insight drives decisions worth about $1.6 billion a year
OneStream found that Finance-led insight drives decisions worth an average of about $1.6 billion per organization annually. Finance-led early-warning signals helped organizations prevent an average of more than $10 million in potential operational and financial losses.
ISG Research's Robert Kugel said most organizations are scaling AI faster than the data foundation it relies on, and that AI taking on more consequential work requires transparent, explainable, and traceable decisions. OneStream Founder and CEO Tom Shea said deploying AI on data that cannot be fully traced or trusted compounds enterprise risk as systems act more autonomously.
Leaders beat Followers on data lineage, ROI and IT alignment
Among Forward Finance Leaders, 86% maintain end-to-end data lineage across financial and operational systems. Some 68% report tangible gains in operational performance insight, versus 39% of Followers, and 66% report AI-driven data quality improvements, versus 46%.
Some 82% of Leaders track whether operational decisions deliver expected outcomes, against 66% of Followers. Leaders also harmonize operational data (88% vs. 68%) and market data (88% vs. 62%) with IT at higher rates.
Leaders also redesign Finance roles around human judgment and insight rather than manual production.