Corporate AI spending has doubled in a year, reaching 3.3% of revenue, according to a recent survey from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) of more than 1,300 chief executives and senior leaders. The shift is forcing CIOs, CFOs, and business leaders to clarify who controls funding, technology decisions, and accountability for results. The report points to a fundamental change in how organizations manage AI investments, with decision-making authority now spread across the C-suite rather than concentrated in IT departments.
BCG's survey found that 80% of AI spending now sits outside the enterprise IT budget, even though CIOs and their IT teams often remain responsible for implementing and supporting AI deployments. Meanwhile, a September 2026 study from the IBM Institute for Business Value, conducted with Oxford Economics, found that 62% of 1,500 CFOs and equivalent senior finance leaders surveyed said they had taken on enterprise technology or AI strategy leadership responsibilities in recent years. Another 56% reported greater portfolio-management and capital reallocation authority, while 54% had taken on more responsibility for business model or growth strategy design.
BCG's report, The Formula for Agentic AI Value, points to a unified approach to AI decision-making, saying future-built companies concentrate AI efforts in a single, coherent program and make the C-suite responsible for it. Khalid Khan, partner and Americas lead for the Digital and Analytics practice at Kearney, a global strategy and management consulting firm, said in the report, "If AI is going to drive meaningful P&L impact, the leaders who own the P&L must own the change." He added that "AI is no longer just a technology deployment but a value creation lever across the enterprise P&L."
The report explains that the shift complicates the division of responsibility because AI investments increasingly require changes to workflows, capabilities, and incentives — changes to the operating model of the enterprise or function. Organizations are realizing that value from AI comes from a more connected enterprise, and the funding model is starting to reflect that shift. Business and functional leaders should own the intended outcome, changes to how work gets done, adoption, and realized business results, while the CFO should determine capital allocation and challenge the value thesis, with finance validating benefits and informing decisions to scale, redirect, or stop funding. The CIO owns architecture, integration, and shared technology capabilities, working with security, data, and risk leaders to set deployment requirements.
The report highlights how some organizations are already adopting this collaborative model. Xero, which makes online accounting software for businesses, centralized AI decision-making and oversight with company leadership in early 2026. Xero CFO Claire Bramley said executives decided to use companywide AI platforms rather than let every function pick its own AI platform, determining that was the "most efficient and effective way to use AI." Despite centralized decision-making, Xero divided annual AI consumption costs between two budgets: the product and technology team and IT. The company's finance team worked with IT and engineering to estimate overall AI cost per worker, with engineers on the product and technology team assigned a higher per-worker cost due to significantly higher AI use. The central leadership team monitors AI costs and adjusts when needed — for example, it found non-engineers were often using more complex and more expensive AI models than necessary, so it made less-complex models the default for those workers. Organizations that fail to align budget authority with operational accountability may find their AI investments stalled between competing stakeholders, while the real competitive risk lies in whether the shift empowers faster decisions or simply creates more approval layers.