Standing still is the riskiest AI move 🧠

Three CFOs I spoke with this month all said roughly the same thing: they are waiting to see how AI plays out before committing real capital to it.

That posture used to be called prudent. Right now, in this environment, it is a competitive liability -- and this edition covers why the math on inaction is worse than most finance leaders have modeled.

74%

The share of finance leaders who say their organizations are increasing AI investment this year, according to recent CFO survey data cited by SiliconAngle -- while fewer than one in three have a formal governance framework to go with it.

The gap between spending and governance is where the real risk lives. Organizations are committing capital without the controls to measure return, which means finance leaders who have not embedded themselves in AI decision-making are flying blind on both the upside and the downside. If you do not own the AI investment thesis inside your company, someone else is spending your budget without your accountability framework.

At the second company I advised post-exit, we had approved seven AI pilots across three business units before anyone asked who owned the ROI measurement. The answer was nobody. We spent four months unwinding overlapping vendor contracts and rebuilding the tracking from scratch.

Immediate payoff: You stop being the last person in the room to know how much the company is spending on AI. You gain a governance structure that lets you approve investments faster with less risk. And you walk into the next board meeting with a defensible answer to the question every board is now asking.

Tech companies are recruiting sitting CFOs directly from their own audit committees, bypassing traditional search timelines entirely.

My take: The Marvell-Adobe move is not an anomaly -- it is a preview of how competitive the CFO market is about to get. When a company can pull a CFO who already knows the business, the team, and the risk profile, the onboarding discount is enormous. If you are a sitting CFO who serves on outside boards, your visibility is now a double-edged asset. And if you are trying to retain a strong CFO, understand that your audit committee roster is essentially a competitor's recruiting shortlist.

Ensono CFO Scott Grossman argues that treating inaction as the safe path on AI is itself a strategic risk that finance leaders can no longer afford.

My take: Grossman's point about converting internal AI capabilities into revenue-generating products is the one most CFOs skip past -- and it deserves more attention. The organizations that will win are the ones where finance helped build the business case for AI-as-product, not just AI-as-cost-reduction. That requires a different posture from the finance function: less gatekeeper, more co-architect. Most CFOs I know are not there yet, and the window to get ahead of it is narrowing.

CFO.com outlines three capabilities modern FP&A leaders need: converting complexity to clarity, delivering candid analysis, and owning the financial narrative.

My take: The framing from CFO.com is right, but the execution gap is wider than the article acknowledges. Most FP&A teams are still measured on close speed and variance analysis, not on how well they shaped a decision. If you want your FP&A function to operate as a strategic partner, you have to change what you reward -- starting with whether your FP&A lead is in the room when strategy is being set, not just when it needs to be modeled. Capability follows incentive. If the incentive is still scorekeeping, that is what you will get.

The most common place I see this break is in the gap between what the business thinks it is spending on AI and what finance can actually see. Most mid-market companies have AI costs scattered across software renewals, professional services, and cloud infrastructure -- none of it tagged consistently.

Here is how to get visibility without standing up a new system:

1. Tag AI spend at the GL level

Add a consistent project code or cost center tag to every vendor or contract that includes an AI, automation, or machine learning component -- retroactive to the start of your current fiscal year.

2. Pull a consolidated AI spend report monthly

Use your existing ERP or BI tool to create a saved report filtered by that tag, showing spend by business unit, vendor, and use case -- no new software required.

3. Map spend to stated outcomes

For each tagged line item, require the business unit owner to document the original ROI claim in a shared tracker -- a simple spreadsheet is sufficient at this stage.

4. Flag variance between projected and actual ROI quarterly

At the end of each quarter, compare actual measured outcomes against the original claim and flag any initiative that is more than 20% off-track for a formal review conversation.

Control check:

Can you tell the board today, in under two minutes, exactly how much the company has spent on AI this fiscal year, which business units own it, and what the measured return has been so far?

The CFOs who build this visibility now will be the ones who can approve the next AI investment in a week instead of a quarter -- because they already have the governance infrastructure to back it up.

The CFOs who are losing ground on AI are not the ones who made a bad investment. They are the ones who made no investment and called it discipline.

I have watched this pattern play out in every major technology cycle I have been close to. The finance leaders who waited for certainty before committing capital ended up spending twice as much to catch up -- and doing it under pressure, which is the worst condition for good capital allocation decisions.

The uncomfortable truth is that governance and boldness are not opposites. The best AI governance frameworks I have seen were built by CFOs who were already inside the investment, not standing outside it with a clipboard.

If your current posture is 'wait and see,' the question worth asking this week is: wait for what, exactly? The business case will not get cleaner. The competitive window will not get wider. The board will not get more patient.

Get in the room before someone else owns the narrative.

Until next edition. — Marcus Reid

P.S. One thing worth doing this week: pull every contract your company has renewed in the last 12 months that includes an AI or automation component, and check whether anyone in finance owns the ROI measurement. The answer will tell you a lot.