Inside Finance's AI Decision: Why we asked 89 senior finance leaders what they're actually doing with AI

A new cross-sectional study from Pulley on what 89 finance leaders are deploying, measuring, and planning with AI in 2026.

Every week, our team at Pulley is in conversations with finance leaders running into the same problems. The board wants an “AI strategy” by next quarter. Their CEO wants an “AI update” by Friday. A peer at another company just told them they're cutting close time in half “with AI.” 

But when they go looking for hard data on what's actually working and how peers are approaching transformation, there isn't much to find beyond vendor decks or LinkedIn content. Finance leaders need access to open and honest information to drive change and meet rising expectations around AI.

That's why we ran this study.

Earlier this year, we surveyed 89 senior finance leaders at mid-market and enterprise companies—CFOs, VPs of Finance, VPs of FP&A, and Controllers. We asked them what they're really doing with AI, where it's paying off, and where they're stuck. 

The result is Inside Finance's AI Decision: What 89 finance leaders told us in 2026, published today.

The full report is free to read here.

The headline finding

The number that surprised me most was that 70% of teams have deployed at least one AI tool, but only 1 in 10 have AI deeply embedded across multiple workflows. 

That gap between the deployment and the "AI transformation" everyone is talking about is the focus of this report.

Five interesting takeaways for finance leaders

1. Most CFOs aren't cutting finance headcount; they're raising the hiring bar. Only 7% of finance teams are hiring more because of AI. 47% are hiring less or slower, and 12% of enterprise respondents have already reduced headcount. The skills premium has shifted decisively toward judgment in AI-augmented workflows, data analytics, and systems and integration literacy — finance is hiring orchestrators, not operators.

2. Finance teams are scaling AI spend on faith, not evidence. 65% plan to increase AI spend over the next 12–18 months, but only 15% formally measure ROI. For a function that runs on measurement, AI is the one investment most finance teams aren't measuring fully yet.

3. The real blockers aren't the tools. 33% cite team capacity as the single biggest barrier to doing more with AI. Just 7% say the right tools don't exist. The constraint is organizational (think: data quality, process immaturity, connectivity gaps), not technological.

4. Governance has not kept pace with deployment. 45% have no written AI policy, or rely on informal norms only. Teams are running AI in production while policies are still being drafted. That's an audit risk, a compliance risk, and a credibility risk with the board—the same board pushing for AI updates.

5. The market has articulated the AI product it wants — and it doesn't exist yet. 75% rate a cross-system AI interface (one that answers complex questions by pulling validated outputs from multiple finance tools at once) as very or extremely valuable. It's also what most teams are least prepared to deploy and what most vendors don't yet offer well.

Who this report is for

If you're a CFO, VP of Finance, VP of FP&A, or Controller at a mid-market or enterprise B2B company trying to figure out what's signal and what's noise in finance AI right now, this report is the peer data you've been missing.

If you're a board member, CEO, or investor calibrating your AI expectations of a finance team, this report is the reality check you should read before your next budget conversation.

A note on what this report isn't

It's not a "State of." This is a cross-sectional study, not a population-level benchmark. The findings describe what 89 finance leaders surveyed in May and June 2026 reported. They reflect real patterns from real finance leaders.

I won't pretend Pulley doesn't have a stake in the answers here. The problems in this report like connectivity across a finance stack or outputs you can defend in an audit are the ones we work on. The AI direction finance leaders described is one we're actively building toward.

But the report's focus is on the data and what 89 finance leaders said about it. The same questions our customers are wrestling with are the ones we've been trying to solve with our products.

This report is also grounded in reality. We wrap things up with five plays to run with your finance team, informed directly by patterns in this cohort data—and what separates the finance teams getting real returns from the ones still chasing them.

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Download the full report here.