This report, AI in Finance 2026, examines where those gains are coming from and what’s driving them. It builds on our 2024 research on AI in financial reporting, expanding the focus to the full finance function — including governance, controls, and the workforce. The findings are based on a survey of 1,013 senior finance leaders across 13 sectors and 20 countries. The dynamic in finance parallels what KPMG's Q1 2026 Global AI Pulse found at the enterprise level: AI maturity is outpacing the operating capability to translate it into performance.
The 2026 finance survey reflects this. Technology and Financial Services organizations are over-represented relative to the market, which means headline adoption figures are partly shaped by the sectors furthest along. Sector-level differences are noted throughout where material. Across sectors, finance leaders are navigating a shared set of operational questions: where AI is producing the strongest performance gains, whether to lead or follow on adoption, how to measure what AI is delivering, how to strengthen the controls around it, and how to build the total workforce, human and AI, that can sustain it. These are live conversations in boardrooms and finance functions, not theoretical ones.
One theme stands out. The organizations moving fastest on AI are those that have made trust — governance, controls, human oversight — part of how performance gets built, not a cost of compliance. This sits at the heart of KPMG's Trusted AI framework, the interpretive thread for the findings that follow. This report offers a grounded, evidence-based view of where AI is producing performance gains in finance today, where it is not, and what the leaders getting results are doing differently.
