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Finance is eager to embrace AI, but trust is low, PEX finds

Thursday, September 10, 2026 — 16:09:48 (UTC)

Finance is eager to embrace AI, but trust is low: PEX’s State of Finance Report finds teams not ready to hand over control

New survey reveals wide gap between AI ambition and execution as businesses struggle to move beyond early adoption

September 10, 2026 09:00 ET | Source: PEX

NEW YORK, Sept. 10, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Appetite for AI is strong among finance teams, but execution isn’t. New research from PEX, the corporate card and spend management platform, found a significant gap between finance teams’ AI ambitions and actual adoption. PEX’s 2026 State of Finance Report surveyed nearly 700 finance and operations leaders and found that more than half want to use every AI capability tested – interest runs from 53% to 66%. Just 9% of finance teams use AI broadly, while just 5% can measure that return.

Finance teams want the outcomes AI offers, but they’re not ready to hand over control: fewer than three in ten (28%) are comfortable letting AI make routine financial decisions, while 39% are uncomfortable – and a lack of trust is the single largest barrier to expanding AI.

For middle market businesses, the stakes are particularly high: as these growing companies scale, finance teams face increasing transaction volume, operational complexity and pressure to do more with the resources they have. The opportunity is to build for that complexity now, using AI and automation to create capacity, strengthen control, and scale finance alongside the business.

Key findings from PEX’s 2026 State of Finance Report include:

Execution is early, but shallow: 51% of finance teams don’t use AI at all, 46% place themselves at the earliest stage of maturity and only 9% are scaling or advanced.

Adoption climbs with size; comfort does not: AI use climbs from just 21% at sub-$10M organizations to 52% of those over $250M in size, but the largest organizations are also among the most uncomfortable (42%).

AI adoption is uneven across industries: 48% of professional & managerial organizations use AI, while nonprofits and media & entertainment trail at only 23%.

Automation falls short where teams want it most: 30% cite manual receipts and reconciliation as a top challenge, 31% spend 20+ hours a month on manual work, and only 18% enforce policy at the point of the transaction.

“AI has created enormous expectations for what finance teams can accomplish, but the reality inside most organizations hasn’t caught up with the ambition,” said Toffer Grant, founder and CEO of PEX. “To entrust AI with financial decisions that carry real consequences for a business, the bar for handing over control is understandably high. Finance leaders need confidence that AI can deliver greater efficiency without compromising accuracy, control or accountability. That trust will only come from proving AI’s value in practice before handing it greater responsibility.”

The path forward doesn’t require finance teams to automate everything all at once. It starts with replacing high-volume, repetitive work like receipt matching, where AI can create immediate capacity while giving teams a lower-risk environment to prove its reliability. By starting with a focused use case, finance teams can validate ROI and build trust before layering on additional capabilities. From there, they can move from automating individual tasks to embedding intelligence into more consequential workflows that enforce policy, reconcile transactions and flag anomalies in real time.

As that trust compounds, AI can take on greater responsibility – not just identifying what needs to happen next, but carrying work forward, adapting to changing conditions and acting within the controls businesses have established. Building toward that level of autonomy one step at a time allows finance teams to establish the trust and controls needed to ultimately put AI to work across more of the finance function.

Learn more about PEX’s approach and read the full findings of the 2026 State of Finance Report by downloading a copy here.

About PEX

PEX is a corporate card and spend management platform that helps businesses control and track spending in real time. Through prepaid, charge, disburse and virtual cards backed by customizable spend controls, AI-powered receipt capture, and automated workflows, PEX gives owners and finance leaders the visibility and automation they need to reduce manual work, enforce policy, and run modern financial operations. To learn more, visit www.pexcard.com.

Methodology

This report is based on 687 responses from finance and operations leaders, collected across multiple survey waves in 2026 and combined into a single validated dataset. Six further responses whose industry could not be classified were excluded. Respondents span organization sizes from under $10M to more than $250M in annual revenue and four industry clusters. The sample includes both PEX customers and non-customers. PEX tested the two groups on all 21 measures and found no significant difference on 20 of them. For more details on methodology, please see page 5 of the 2026 State of Finance Report.

Media Contact

Walker Sands for PEX pex@walkersands.com

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Source: Company press release.

Categories: Reports and research