GenAI investment is exploding, but are companies seeing real ROI? Finance and strategy leaders face mounting pressure to turn hype into impact.
Gartner reports that 87% of enterprise leaders plan to boost GenAI spending. Yet few are aligning those investments with business outcomes.
An additional 84% expect to raise broader AI spending, and 82% will pour more into business intelligence and analytics tools. The message is clear: the age of AI isn’t coming – it’s already here.
But there’s a quiet tension beneath the surface. For many organizations, investment is rising faster than clarity. AI budgets are expanding, yes – but what’s often missing is a grounded, value-focused strategy behind the spend. In the rush to stay competitive, the question of “what are we solving for?” is too often overlooked.
The Hype Is Understandable, but Also Risky
There’s no mystery around why GenAI is getting so much attention. Companies feel pressure to act as AI becomes a board-level expectation. Internal teams are eager to experiment, vendors are reshaping their offerings, and a few early adopters are reporting wins with copilots and content automation.
But the hype is also creating a blind spot. Many organizations are committing resources before they’ve answered foundational questions about readiness, data quality, or long-term impact. The danger isn’t that GenAI doesn’t work – it’s that it’s being deployed without direction.
McKinsey’s 2024 State of AI report sheds light on this. While 65% of companies say they’re using GenAI in some form, only a fraction are doing so at scale, and fewer still can point to measurable business outcomes. Many pilots remain isolated from core operations. Tools are rolled out without clear ownership. And governance – around privacy, security, and ethical use – is often an afterthought.
GenAI Isn’t Plug-and-Play
For all its power, generative AI isn’t magic. When organizations try to scale it without the right foundation, issues quickly surface. Low-quality or fragmented data leads to unreliable outputs. Pilots stall when they don’t connect to real workflows. And without clear accountability, initiatives drift—costing time, money, and trust.
This is where many teams are getting stuck. They’re spending, but not scaling. Deploying tools, but not embedding them. Investing in the potential of AI, but not tying it back to the practical needs of the business.
Reframing the AI Investment Discussion
To move forward, companies need to rethink how they approach GenAI. Not as a shiny object to acquire, but as a strategic capability to build with purpose.
That begins by asking the right question: what business problem are we trying to solve?
There’s a big difference between automating a marketing task and transforming a forecasting process. GenAI is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Leaders must be intentional about where and how it’s applied—and align each use case to a measurable outcome.
Rather than starting with the technology, start with the need. Then build the stack, the team, and the governance around that.
A Call for Financial Leadership
This is especially critical for finance and FP&A teams. As budgets grow, so does their responsibility not just to approve funding, but to shape the investment strategy itself.
Finance leaders need to be more than gatekeepers. They must be active participants in defining where GenAI delivers real value, setting thresholds for acceptable risk, and helping teams think beyond the pilot phase. That means asking harder questions about total cost of ownership, evaluating long-term ROI, and ensuring that tools don’t just function, but actually improve the business.
As CFO.com recently put it, the finance function must become a central player in AI strategy: helping organizations spend not just more, but smarter.
The Moment Demands Discipline
The GenAI wave is real, and the opportunities are significant. But value doesn’t come from investment alone, it comes from intention. The companies that succeed will be those that tie their AI efforts directly to business priorities, who build strong foundations of data and governance, and who lead with clarity, not just curiosity.
This isn’t a race to spend. It’s a call to plan. And those who answer that call with purpose will be the ones who win the future.