97% of CFOs Trust Gen AI to Manage Risk

Enterprise chief financial officials (CFOs) may be celebrating the transformative potential of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI), but beneath the optimism lies a quieter story: trust.

While most finance chiefs now report the technology is delivering measurable value, what enables them to put gen AI into sensitive roles is their conviction that its output is reliable and trustworthy. That conviction, more than the raw numbers, is what’s turning gen AI into an indispensable part of the corporate toolkit.

PYMNTS Intelligence details the extent of that trust, based on a December survey of 60 CFOs at billion-dollar U.S. enterprises. The data shows the speed of gen AI adoption has accelerated dramatically.

Nearly 9 in 10 CFOs now say they see a “very positive” return on the technology, up more than threefold from the prior spring. Companies are leaning on gen AI for everything from cybersecurity defense to customer service chatbots.

But behind the productivity gains, the research reveals the less-discussed factor driving adoption: an extraordinary level of trust among CFOs in the accuracy and reliability of gen AI’s output.

Near-universal trust across critical functions. At least 91% of surveyed CFOs expressed high or complete trust in gen AI across 10 core business areas. For risk management, 68% called it very important, and 97% said they had high or complete trust in its output.

Confidence in strategy and reporting. Seventy-six percent of CFOs said gen AI is highly important for strategic planning, with 98% expressing strong trust. In financial reporting, 74% rated gen AI’s role as highly important and 98% again voiced strong trust.

Trust outweighs skepticism, but it is worth noting that concerns remain. Roughly one-third of CFOs still worry about limits. Twenty-nine percent said gen AI results may lack insight; 28% flagged risks of unauthorized access to outputs; and 21% voiced concern over bias. Yet more than two-thirds of CFOs dismissed these concerns, underscoring how heavily the balance tilts toward confidence.

The report’s other findings add nuance to this portrait of guarded optimism. Gen AI is being deployed across an expanding set of tasks, from fraud detection to producing summaries and literature reviews.

Adoption rates for many applications doubled or tripled over just nine months, showing both the appetite for experimentation and the pressure to extract value quickly. At the same time, most tasks still require human intervention. Seventy-three percent of CFOs, for instance, said they need staff involvement to generate new content with gen AI, and nearly two-thirds said human review remains essential even for low-impact tasks like drafting employee feedback.

CFOs are not simply betting on software; they are betting on their own ability to control it, feeding gen AI with trusted internal data and confining it to contexts where oversight is possible.

The PYMNTS Intelligence data indicates that ROI alone doesn’t explain the rapid mainstreaming of gen AI in the C-suite. It is the trust factor—built on data provenance, cautious implementation and human review—that has unlocked both the confidence to scale and the willingness to put gen AI at the center of sensitive corporate decisions.