Seven in ten companies blew their AI budget - and most still can't prove it paid for itself
Uprovd Take A survey showing most firms overspend on AI while almost none can point to a measurable return is Uprovd's thesis in miniature: without governed spend and measured outcomes, AI becomes a bill nobody can defend.
Read the original at CFO DiveA new WitnessAI study, covered this week by CFO Dive, puts hard numbers on a problem finance teams already feel. Roughly two-thirds of the 300 executives surveyed admitted at least some of their AI projects had run past budget in the last year, and about a third said the overruns were the norm rather than the exception.
The return side of the ledger looks worse. Only about one in eleven respondents could say that most of their AI initiatives had produced a return anyone could actually measure. Meanwhile the pressure to close that gap is near-universal - the large majority feel they must tie AI spending to business outcomes within the year, yet only about a fifth say they have managed it so far.
That is the exact space Uprovd operates in. Runaway cost with no line of sight to value is not two problems but one: spend that was never instrumented against an outcome. We baseline each initiative and hold its cost against the result it delivered, so a CFO facing this survey’s questions has an answer instead of an apology.
This is Uprovd's analysis of third-party reporting. Original article linked above.