Finance Teams Spend 26% of Week Checking AI Output

Datarails has published its 2026 CFO Sentiments Survey, finding that finance teams spend 26% of their workweek verifying or correcting AI output. All 270 CFOs surveyed reported using AI for finance processes, while 96% spend at least 10% of their time checking its results. Just 5% trust AI to produce board-ready financial reports without human review, and 4% trust it with month-end close. The survey also found that 60% of CFOs are redeploying staff to higher-value work as AI takes on more everyday tasks.

The Verification Burden

Nearly one-third of CFOs, 32%, said their organizations exceeded AI budgets by at least 10% in the past year. Even so, 53% plan to expand AI licenses over the next 12 months.

Didi Gurfinkel, CEO and co-founder of Datarails, said:

“What this survey shows is that although AI adoption is now standard for CFOs, caution hasn't disappeared. Finance teams have stopped asking 'will we use AI?' and started asking 'how am I going to most effectively check its work?'”

Auditability Limits Trust

Lack of auditability was the largest obstacle to fully trusting AI for mission-critical finance tasks, cited by 75% of respondents. Concerns about accuracy and hallucinations followed at 71%, while 54% cited regulatory or compliance concerns.

Sixty-five percent of CFOs identified confident answers based on incorrect data as their most common AI frustration. The survey found that 56% had seen team members receive materially different outputs from an LLM using the same prompt and data.

Data Readiness Remains Uneven

Only 4% of respondents reported having a single source of truth for finance and operational data. While 73% said their data is mostly centralized, 23% rely on disconnected systems and manual reconciliation.

Finance leaders facing manual reporting and data-consolidation challenges were more likely to report AI generating confident answers from incorrect data, at 86% compared with 65% across all respondents. Seventy-six percent of CFOs reported high or very high pressure to fully implement AI, but only 7% said their finance function was fully ready across all workflows.

Staff Shift Toward Higher Value Work

The survey points to limited AI-driven job cuts in finance. Only 3% of CFOs said they were actively reducing FTEs in the CFO’s Office because of AI, while 60% said they were redeploying employees to higher-value work.

Didi Gurfinkel, CEO and co-founder of Datarails, said:

“Fears of job losses have been largely allayed, but the challenge of AI output verification is critical. Tackling it will allow finance teams to spend less time doing intensive checking, and let them focus instead on the strategic work they were actually hired to do.”