Survey data shows finance teams are spending 26 percent of the workday checking automated outputs.
Illustration: Inc; Photo: Adobe Stock
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AI is creating a significant new workload inside finance departments. Teams are now spending an eye-popping average of 26 percent of their workday verifying or correcting finance-specific AI outputs, according to new research.
Datarails’ 2026 CFO Sentiments Survey, “How AI is Changing Finance Departments,” called the phenomenon “the verification burden.”
The survey also found that 96 percent of CFOs spend at least 10 percent of their work time verifying or correcting finance-specific AI outputs, while another 8 percent spend more than half of their work time on such checks.
Jonathan Marciano, Datarails VP of brand and communication, told Inc. that a year ago, the talk was solely about AI adoption and whether CFOs would use it at all. In fact, the survey noted that CFOs were “late to the AI party,” even though that cautious approach was right.
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“That debate is over,” Marciano said. “The new challenge is verification, and the time it takes surprised us. AI was supposed to take manual work off finance teams. Instead, it has handed them a second job: checking the AI.”
Another finding: 32 percent of CFOs said their companies blew past their AI budgets, “by at least 10 percent in the past 12 months,” mostly because of the verification burden.
As Marciano put it, AI returns a number that doesn’t fit; teams re-prompt, rephrase, and run it again, often in a second tool to check the first. And every retry costs tokens, so AI costs creep up in ways nobody budgeted for, Marciano said. To avoid blowing past AI budgets, Marciano said teams should assign a single owner to AI spend, rationalize overlapping tools, and improve the data AI runs on.