Businesses have been investing heavily in AI for operational and cost efficiencies, but it’s not yet clear whether those investments are helping achieve business goals like adaptability and resilience. For example, 3 out of 4 CFOs who took part in a recent executive outlook survey said they’ve invested in AI. But when asked if they were confident that those AI investments are driving ROI, fewer than one in three said yes. To realize value in the year ahead, businesses need a wider lens on how to create value with AI.
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The CFO data aligns with a trend of AI initiatives falling short of expectations across industries and project types. An MIT/NANDA report made headlines earlier this year with its finding that 95% of organizations with GenAI investments have seen no return on that spend. The report authors asserted that the major hurdle is GenAI’s inability to “retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.” The 5% of GenAI projects that have delivered value, they noted, proactively addressed that inability. AI capabilities aren’t the only obstacle on the path to ROI. In 2026, Gartner predicts a 60% abandonment rate for AI projects “unsupported by AI-ready data.”
These numbers indicate that AI investment by itself isn’t the key to ROI and resilience in uncertain economic times. Successful AI projects also require strategic and technological support, including data preparation and people with the skills to anticipate and adapt to AI limitations. That support results from investment in other areas of the business, including non-AI technologies and talent. When AI, financial, and human capital investments are in balance, companies have a more sustainable framework for value creation that can withstand macroeconomic shifts.
Financial and technology investments support agility
The executive outlook survey indicated that many leaders were already investing in areas other than AI in the first half of 2025, driven by the need to build agility in today’s economic climate. Sixty-two percent of respondents said their organizations experienced “significant impacts” due to macroeconomic factors such as interest rates and tariffs. Forecasting and supply chain were most affected by those factors.
At the same time, more than half of respondents said their organizations had increased capital investment and operating expenses, with a quarter planning to increase their spend in these areas over the next 6 months. Strategic planning and forecasting was the top priority for 37% of leaders’ organizations, while cybersecurity was the top concern for 36%.
Spending in these areas appears to be increasing and can intersect with AI initiatives: Another recent survey found that 60% of tech and business leaders are stepping up cyber risk investment, an area where AI already plays a central role because of its threat-detection capabilities. AI can assist with planning and forecasting as well, by analyzing company data and relevant third-party data sets like market and climate data to generate accurate forecasts quickly.
Human capital investments enable and benefit from AI
The major challenge cited in that survey for implementing cybersecurity AI was “knowledge and skills gaps.” This highlights the need for human capital investment. More than a third of leaders in the executive outlook survey reported increasing headcount before August 2025, with 38% planning to add people in the following six months. However, finding people with the right skills can be a challenge, especially in specialized and high-demand fields such as cybersecurity and finance and accounting.
For example, 61% of executive outlook respondents reported that their finance and accounting departments spend more than half of their time each week keeping up with changing macroeconomic factors. That’s a critical function in uncertain times. Yet organizations have also been dealing with an accounting talent shortage for nearly a decade, and it seems set to continue.
The number of new bachelor’s and master’s graduates in accounting fell 6.6% in 2024 from the previous year, although the number of accounting students rose by 12% during the same period. Meanwhile, organizations are using AI process automation and outsourcing to cover open finance and accounting roles and alleviate pressure on their existing talent.
Using AI to support talent leads us back to the challenge of finding people who can implement and optimize AI for ROI. It’s not just cybersecurity where talent is needed for successful AI implementations. Fifty-two percent of CFOs in the executive outlook survey cited “lack of skilled talent to manage AI systems” as a top implementation challenge. AI investments and human capital investments are increasingly intertwined.
A balanced approach to investment for resilience
All this survey data tells us that resilience doesn’t come from an AI project or solution alone. There needs to be a proper data and technology foundation for ROI on AI investments, and that foundation requires people with the right skills. However, certain types of AI can be helpful to overcome the chicken-or-egg problem of talent shortages in the areas where organizations want to focus the most, such as finance and cybersecurity.
Adopting solutions that use AI to automate repetitive, high-volume tasks — such as threat triage in cybersecurity and AP and AR in accounting — can free up employees to focus on higher value tasks. Those tasks might include upskilling or reskilling to work more proficiently with company data, develop forecasting and security AI use cases based on solid data foundations, or scale AI use cases to increase ROI. AI on its own probably can’t save companies from the challenges of a fast-changing marketplace, but it’s an indispensable part of a framework that can build real resilience in 2026 and beyond.
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