Share with your CFO
Most CFOs are measuring AI ROI the wrong way, and the gap is costing them competitive ground. Dean Quiambao, a partner at Armanino (an advisory firm with a natural interest in broadening the scope of AI engagements), argues that the efficiency-only frame treats AI as a defensive IT expense rather than a capital allocation decision. The better lens connects AI investment to revenue impact, forecasting quality, and organizational agility, outcomes that compound slowly but dwarf any headcount reduction you can calculate on day one.
What this means for your business
Where you sit on this depends on how your organization first deployed AI. Companies that led with back-office automation, reconciliations, support queue reduction, built their internal success metrics around those use cases, and those metrics now anchor the conversation in a way that’s hard to dislodge. If your AI budget still reports into IT and gets measured against a cost-savings target, you’re not measuring the wrong number by accident. You built the system to produce that number, and it will keep producing it regardless of what the technology actually does to your competitive position.
The argument that efficiency metrics create a “blind spot” is correct, but the mechanism is subtler than Quiambao states. The problem isn’t that CFOs are unsophisticated. It’s that efficiency gains are auditable and defensible in a board presentation, while competitive agility is not. A CFO who claims AI improved forecasting accuracy by 15 points and shortened the planning cycle by three weeks can be challenged; a CFO who claims AI is building a durable speed advantage cannot easily prove it, and that asymmetry pushes rational finance leaders toward the metric they can defend. Fixing this requires changing what the board asks for, not just what the CFO tracks.
The CFOs most exposed to getting this wrong are in industries where competitive moves are rapid and data-intensive: retail, financial services, logistics. In those sectors, a competitor who has connected AI to pricing strategy or demand forecasting compounds an advantage every quarter you spend counting hours saved. The decision this reframes isn’t whether to invest more in AI. It’s whether your current measurement framework would even let you see that advantage disappearing in time to respond. If your AI reporting lives inside a cost-reduction dashboard, the answer is probably no.
Based on reporting from Why CFOs are getting AI ROI wrong and how to fix it, originally published 2026-07-28 07:51:00.
