The cost of using the latest artificial intelligence tools is rising, and many finance chiefs don’t expect that to change anytime soon. Many also don’t expect to stop their organization’s forays into the nascent technology.
In Deloitte’s recent survey of 1,434 finance leaders, 60% said they expect “AI costs and complexity to rise substantially through 2027.” As a result, the same share of respondents said they’ll need to adopt “more sophisticated AI cost management practices,” the report said, which was released Wednesday morning.
Not everyone agreed with those sentiments, with 35% of respondents saying they plan to maintain current cost management practices on AI because they think that costs and complexity will “remain modest.”
The survey, which went to CFOs and similar high-ranking finance executives in 26 countries in spring, comes as finance teams deal with the sticker shock of the latest enterprise-scale AI tools. After encouraging employees to use tools like ChatGPT, Claude and others, many business leaders are now pushing workers to use such tools only for a narrower set of use cases.
The new survey, titled “Finance Trends 2027,” is a relatively new foray for Deloitte; the report released Wednesday is only the second of its kind. The survey goes to a much larger set of respondents than Deloitte’s long-running CFO Signals reports.
Deloitte’s latest survey also showed that despite any reservations finance chiefs may have about AI costs, they nonetheless feel compelled to continue their attempts to integrate the nascent technology into workflows. When asked to name their top three priorities to help drive their organization’s success, 43% of respondents said they plan to “embed AI and advanced technology to automate operations.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a group of CFOs, 34% of respondents cited driving “enterprise cost efficiency” among their top three priorities, and 33% cited optimizing “capital allocation and investment decisions.”
In an interview with CFO.com, U.S. Finance Services Leader Ed Hardy said the survey shows an acknowledgement that “the more you use something, the more you’re paying for it.” He suggested that finance chiefs are willing to keep paying for AI tools when they enable their organizations to do things they couldn’t do before, or to do their existing functions more efficiently. But there are limits.
“Organizations are debating and constantly playing with the models they’re using internally to determine how they rationalize the best use cases, and then ultimately therefore how they’re going to measure the ROI for the benefits they’re achieving,” Hardy said. “There will come a point where some use cases won’t make sense, where it is efficient to achieve with the human hand, if you will.”
And as finance leaders grapple with increasing responsibilities, some respondents are apparently preparing to make big changes to their own teams. Forty-three percent of survey takers said they plan to “change how work is completed within finance, either by restructuring the function or working with outside partners to operate portions of it.
“Finance leaders increasingly have a say in tech strategy because their core skills are critical to improving AI’s return on investment, according to the leaders we interviewed,” the report stated.
Hardy pointed to financial forecasting and analysis as one area where finance chiefs are leaning on the technology to reshape their department’s own workflows.
