Deltek Study: 91% of Firms Call AI Critical to Success
New research suggests AI critical to business success has become the near-universal consensus among project-based firms, even as most organizations still struggle to translate that belief into measurable financial returns.
Operating within an unpredictable economy has become the new normal for architecture, engineering, and consulting firms, making financial uncertainty a routine part of daily operations. Despite that instability, 78% of project-based businesses expect profits to increase in 2026, with more than one in five forecasting growth of 10% or higher.
What the Deltek Study Found
To better understand how companies are navigating this landscape, Deltek published new research titled “The CFO’s Agenda,” based on its seventh annual Clarity Study, examining insights gathered from 375 senior strategic decision-makers across the UK, Germany, and Australia.
According to the study, 91% of project-based firms now agree that AI critical to business success is a core reality for their future growth. However, more than half of those same organizations have yet to see meaningful productivity gains or cost savings from their AI investments, revealing a significant gap between belief and measurable business impact.
Finance Leaders Are Stepping In to Close the Gap
Bridging that execution gap is increasingly falling on finance leaders, who are taking on expanded responsibilities to govern technology spending, control costs, and connect project data in order to protect overall business margins.
As finance functions evolve, understanding why AI critical to business success has become a top priority for CFOs worldwide. “While a majority of project-based firms say the technology has become critical to their organisation’s success, the move to realising the benefit is still elusive.”
According to Larkin, finance leaders need to prioritize three key actions to close this gap. First, establishing a shared definition of ROI across finance, operations, and technology teams, helping focus investment toward measurable outcomes like reduced delivery costs or improved forecast accuracy. Second, ensuring a dedicated finance sponsor actively evaluates AI ROI, since spending without financial oversight and measurable outcomes simply becomes overhead rather than genuine investment. Third, focusing specifically on areas where financial impact is most direct and measurable, using early wins to strengthen the broader case for continued AI investment.
Key Figures From the Research
The study highlighted several notable statistics. Over half of surveyed firms still aren’t seeing moderate productivity gains or cost savings from their AI investments, despite widespread belief in its importance. More than one in five firms are forecasting profit growth of 10% or higher heading into 2026.
Cost control has also surged significantly as a stated priority, rising eight percentage points from 26% of firms in 2024 to 34% today. Meanwhile, only one in five organizations currently operate with a fully integrated, end-to-end project management system, a gap that appears directly connected to why so many firms struggle to realize measurable AI returns.
From Experimentation to Measurable Impact
AI critical to business success has clearly become an operational mandate across the industry, yet the research suggests many organizations remain stuck in an experimentation phase rather than achieving genuine financial impact. Deltek’s research points to project planning, resourcing, and performance reporting as the strongest near-term opportunities for AI adoption, with additional substantial value emerging from applying AI tools to billing and back-office finance operations.
Deploying AI effectively across these specific functions tends to improve visibility, reduce manual administrative work, and protect profit margins more directly. The research also flags agentic AI as the next major industry shift, suggesting firms that invest now in integrated data systems and strong governance structures will be best positioned to capture future benefits.
Larkin noted that the highest-performing firms in the study consistently share several common characteristics. “They’re all connecting financial data to project data, embedding AI to deliver measurable returns, treating cyber risk as a financial exposure and building KPI discipline that enables early intervention rather than late reporting,” she said, adding that the CFO role itself has fundamentally evolved. “Today’s finance leaders aren’t simply reporting on performance, they’re shaping it.”
Why Real-Time Financial Visibility Remains a Challenge
A clear structural gap exists between firms that simply track performance and those capable of acting quickly enough on emerging signals to actually protect their margins. While 86% of businesses report tracking operating profit adequately or very well, a notable increase from 75% in 2024, only 22% maintain a fully integrated, end-to-end project management system.
Because so few organizations maintain properly connected systems, many finance leaders are still forced to make commercial decisions using KPI data that’s either manually compiled or fundamentally incomplete. Notably, stronger-performing firms that reported higher profit growth in 2025 were significantly more effective at tracking specific metrics, including project profitability and revenue factor, while also maintaining consistent oversight of net labour margin, backlog, and overhead rate.
Without genuine end-to-end system integration, organizations frequently miss early performance warning signals, often only able to act after profits have already been lost rather than proactively protecting them.
As project-based businesses move further into 2026, a finance leader’s ability to successfully unite data, technology, and cost discipline appears set to become the ultimate differentiator between simply forecasting profit and genuinely realizing it, reinforcing just how central the belief that AI critical to business success has become across the industry.
Source: This article is based on reporting by Diya Joseph for FDi Intelligence.