Good morning. AI is moving fast, but many companies still have not decided who should own the job of turning that momentum into measurable business value.
At Fortune’s Modern CFO dinner in San Francisco last Thursday, sponsored by Deloitte and ServiceNow, Melissa Valentine, a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, delivered a clear message to CFOs: they have a narrowing window to take command of AI value creation.
Valentine pointed to a recent Harvard Business Review article by the founders of the Return on AI Institute, citing survey findings that underscore this opening. Only 2% of the C-suite executives surveyed said CFOs were charged with capturing value from AI. Yet when CFOs were responsible, 76% reported generating substantial value, well ahead of other functions. Laks Srinivasan, coauthor of that report, told me that finance chiefs are uniquely positioned to define, evaluate, fund, and measure AI initiatives, then apply that framework across the company.
