Artificial intelligence is being used across most large North American businesses, but finance chiefs remain less assured that their organisations have adequate arrangements to oversee it, according to Deloitte’s second-quarter 2026 CFO Signals survey.
Of 200 chief financial officers at organisations with annual revenue of at least US$1 billion, 93% said their companies used AI to some extent across multiple functions. By contrast, 43% said they were confident in their curren...
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t governance arrangements. The findings suggest that adoption has spread faster than confidence in the systems meant to manage its risks.
Responsibility for oversight is also shared across senior roles. A third of respondents identified the chief information security officer as having the greatest responsibility for AI governance, while 19% named the CFO and 12% the chief executive. The spread of answers points to a practical challenge for companies: deciding who has authority when AI risks cut across technology, finance and executive decision-making.
The most commonly cited obstacle was reconciling pressure to introduce AI quickly with the need to control risk. Some 59% of CFOs identified that tension as the leading challenge to establishing effective governance across their organisations.
Potential damage to a company’s reputation from AI errors concerned 25% of respondents. Deloitte’s report places that risk among a broader set of external worries, including legal exposure involving protected or private content, cybersecurity and regulatory uncertainty. Finance leaders also raised internal issues such as uncertain costs, inaccurate outputs, employee resistance or limited AI fluency, and the use of unapproved tools.
The Institute for Public Relations has highlighted the same findings, drawing on Deloitte’s survey rather than conducting a separate study. CFO.com’s account likewise describes governance as a significant difficulty, while distinguishing general confidence from stronger assurance in existing arrangements.
Deloitte’s CFO Signals programme tracks finance leaders’ views on business conditions and organisational priorities. Its latest AI findings underscore that setting governance expectations is only part of the task: companies must also establish clear accountability and manage the competing demands of rapid deployment and risk control.
Source: Noah Wire Services
