2026 Global AI in Finance Report

More than three-quarters of organizations are leveraging AI in financial planning, reporting and commercial analysis, and 71% report it is meeting or exceeding ROI expectations. But only 23% say AI is exceeding expectations – adoption is outpacing the ability to turn it into performance at scale.

The strongest gains are in judgment-heavy work, not transactional automation: decision quality (70%), decision speed (71%) and forecast accuracy (64%). Organizations deploying agentic AI separated from the rest by 32 points on average, rising to nearly 40 on forecast accuracy and ROI.

Governance is often framed as a brake on AI adoption; the data shows the opposite. Organizations that can produce AI audit evidence efficiently report three to six times the rate of significant improvement – 33% vs 6% on error reduction, 42% vs 14% on confidence in scaling. Assurance readiness predicts performance better than KPI tracking alone, and human oversight remains central to turning AI output into action.

Assurance readiness is the strongest predictor of performance in the study – yet fewer than half of organizations have it. Just 42% are strongly assurance-ready, rising to 60% among agentic AI leaders, meaning even the most advanced are still building the infrastructure. Only 29% formally track where AI adoption fails, leaving most with partial visibility into why it breaks.

36% name data quality, integration and interoperability as their biggest opportunity to extract more value from AI. Yet only 28% are hiring for different skillsets versus 38% upskilling existing teams. Data fluency is critical emerging capability.