Research finds financial industry leaders face intense pressure to prove AI returns
boston, June 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CloudZero, an AI ROI company, today announced new research examining the challenges organizations face when determining the business value of AI deployments. The report, “Discovering the ROI of AI: A Finance Perspective,” is based on a survey of 260 senior finance professionals, more than half of whom are chief financial officers.
As AI adoption proliferates, finance teams are gaining more accurate insight into how much they’re spending, but there’s increasing pressure to demonstrate how AI spend is directly linked to business outcomes.
Research shows that 87% of finance leaders say they need the ability to link AI spend to business results within the next 12 months, but only 22% currently have it. The pressure to close this gap is no longer coming from within finance. 66% of boards now require proof of revenue as a condition for further AI funding, and 43% of finance leaders are already being asked for numbers they can’t deliver. That’s putting a lot of pressure on finance teams. 46% say managing AI spend is currently the most stressful part of their job.
Lack of measurable results results in budget overruns, measurement gaps, and inability to determine what is actually working and where to invest more to deliver the most value to the business.
Key findings include:
- The ROI implementation gap is huge. Not only are less than a quarter of respondents currently able to tie their AI spending to business performance, but most respondents (64%) say outcomes-based ROI will fundamentally change the way they invest. Additionally, 60% said they strongly agreed or agreed with the statement, “We are currently spending more on AI than can be justified by tangible results.”
- The budget is structurally broken. As AI becomes a larger part of spending, traditional budgeting methods become less useful. As the total share of spending on AI increases, the spike in budget overruns increases from 7% to 64%, but the size of overruns is a poor indicator of whether efforts will be discontinued. The pressure is on to spend wisely, not managed.
- Real-time data is a powerful catalyst for investment. Finance teams who receive AI spend data within one day are twice as likely to “invest aggressively” and four times as likely to plan for at least a 50% increase in AI spend compared to teams who wait for monthly invoices.
- Measurement gaps have real consequences. 75% of teams who can’t measure AI outcomes refrain from investing in AI. 35% have completely disabled the initiative.
Download the report here: https://www.cloudzero.com/finance-needs-ai-roi-2026-survey-report/
Dan Carducci, CloudZero Vice President of Finance:Being able to tie AI spending to business outcomes is about more than just tying numbers together. Finance teams that can visualize AI ROI from day one can invest in AI initiatives with more confidence, experience fewer surprises, and build sustainable AI initiatives that drive the business forward. Despite advances, organizations now need powerful and accurate measurement tools. ”
About Cloud Zero
CloudZero is an AI ROI company that provides a financial control plane focused on how AI actually generates costs. Multidimensional allocation captures every AI interaction the moment it occurs and associates it with the customer, product, or feature that drove it, giving finance, operations, and engineering leaders a shared view of cost per customer, cost per product, and cost per feature in real time. AI Hub embeds its intelligence directly into the agent workflows your engineering teams already use. Trusted by leaders such as coinbaseKlaviyo, Miro, Nubank, Rapid7, and CloudZero are how modern enterprises are turning AI spending into business intelligence.
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