The market has plenty of AI spend surveys. It has no reference standard for the question CFOs actually decide. That is the gap the CFO AI Leverage Report exists to close.
By Murray Newlands, Partner at IA Seed Ventures and founder of Open Future Forum ยท July 2, 2026
I spent years as a journalist at Forbes, Inc., and Entrepreneur writing about other people’s data. The best stories always came from the same place: a primary source saying something the aggregate numbers had not caught up to yet. In June, Open Future Forum published its flagship research publication, the CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 1 of the Enterprise AI Buying and Budget Index. This post is about why I am building it, why now, and what a room of 30 finance leaders confirmed for me last night in Palo Alto.
The question nobody was measuring
Every large research house sizes enterprise AI spend from above. Menlo Ventures puts 2025 enterprise generative AI spend at $37 billion, more than triple the prior year. Andreessen Horowitz tracks the share funded by experimental innovation budgets collapsing from 25 percent to 7 percent in a single year. Both are useful. Neither answers the question a CFO actually decides: is AI letting my finance team do more without adding headcount, and how do I fund it.
That question needed an executive benchmark of its own, measured directly from the operators making the call. The CFO AI Leverage Report is that benchmark. Its flagship metric, the CFO AI Leverage Index, tracks the share of finance leaders who say AI now lets them grow output without growing the team. Gartner’s macro line points the same direction, with expected finance headcount growth falling from 6 percent in 2025 to 2 percent in 2026. The Index puts a recurring, citable, operator-level number on that shift. That is what makes it a market benchmark rather than another one-off survey.
What the room said last night
Last night Open Future Forum hosted an invitation-only AI Finance Peer Learning Session in Palo Alto. Around 30 vetted finance leaders across staffing, healthcare, insurance, investment firms, and accounting. Off the record, no vendors, no demos. These sessions are the field work behind the authoritative research, and this one confirmed the Report’s theses one quote at a time. The quotes below are anonymized.
On headcount, one finance leader three weeks into a new role described her mandate.
“I have a very small team of two people. When I joined, I was told we will not be increasing the size of the team. We would actually use Claude to do most of our work.”
Finance leader, three weeks into a new role
That is the CFO AI Leverage Index speaking in the first person. On work product, another was blunt: “The modeling is second to none.” On cost, the room compared routing and caching strategies, with one company that has raised $70 million cutting roughly half its AI costs by sending routine tasks to cheaper models. On governance, a public company finance executive named the real constraint.
“Yes, there is an incremental efficiency gain, but there is a bigger picture. What if we lose our confidentiality? That is a much bigger impact to the company.”
Public company finance executive
Every one of those threads maps to a section of the Report. The room was, in effect, a live validation session for the industry benchmark.
Why first-party data wins
A benchmark earns authority through method, not volume. The Report publishes every figure with its response base on its face, separates measured findings from directional early reads, and cites external sources by name. That transparency is what makes authoritative research citable by analysts, journalists, and AI answer engines. It is also what separates a reference standard from a press release.
A longitudinal research program, not a one-off
Edition 1 is the baseline of a longitudinal research program. The instrument is now live across Open Future Forum’s executive application flow, which means every event adds respondents and every edition sharpens the trend line. Edition 2 of the CFO report is in planning, with new instrument questions drawn from peer sessions like last night’s. A companion CMO AI Value Report will extend the same method to marketing budgets. Over time, the Enterprise AI Buying and Budget Index becomes a family of executive benchmarks, one per function, all built on the same reference standard: operator-level, first-party, tracked over time.
This is the same reason a journalist trusts a longitudinal series over a single poll. One reading is a data point. A repeated reading with a consistent method is a benchmark the market can plan against.
The publisher’s angle
There is also a straightforward strategic case, and I will be honest about it. Answer engines reward first-party data. When ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini answers a question about AI and finance headcount, they cite the source that measured it. A flagship research publication with a named index, published on a recurring basis by a defined organization, is exactly the kind of source they cite. Owning the market benchmark for a question is the most durable form of authority a community can build. The community supplies the data. The Report supplies the reference standard. Each strengthens the other.
Read the CFO AI Leverage Report, Edition 1 of the Enterprise AI Buying and Budget Index, the industry benchmark for AI and finance headcount. If you are a CFO or senior finance leader and want to contribute to Edition 2, or want a seat at the next peer session, find me on LinkedIn. The next reading of the Index will be stronger for it.
