Deltek’s seventh annual Clarity Study, which polled 375 senior decision-makers across the UK, Germany and Australia in January 2026, puts a number on a tension many finance leaders will recognise: 91 percent of project-based firms describe AI as critical to their success, yet more than half have yet to see moderate productivity or cost savings from it.
The report, released today as The CFO’s Agenda, frames this not as a technology problem but a data integration one. Only 22 percent of firms surveyed have a fully integrated, end-to-end project management system, and the study found a clear link between integration maturity and profit performance. Firms that effectively tracked a set of specific KPIs — revenue factor, project profitability, net labour margin, backlog and overhead rate — were more likely to have reported stronger profit growth in 2025.
On the numbers side, the mood is cautiously optimistic: 78 percent of respondents expect profits to rise this year, with more than one in five forecasting growth above 10 percent despite persistent economic uncertainty. Cost control has overtaken revenue growth as the primary lever, with 34 percent of firms naming tighter purchase and approval controls as their biggest profitability driver, up from 26 percent in 2024.
The finance function’s scope has also expanded. Two-thirds of the firms surveyed reported being targeted by a cyber attack in the past three years, and 45 percent of those affected absorbed a direct financial loss, pushing cybersecurity up the CFO’s agenda alongside AI governance and technology investment decisions.
“The role of the CFO has fundamentally changed. Today’s finance leaders aren’t simply reporting on performance, they’re shaping it,” said Heather Larkin, CFO at Deltek. “The highest-performing firms in our study share 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. They understand that it’s not a case of having the most resources or the biggest teams, but about moving fast and demonstrating control.”
The full CFO’s Agenda guide is available at deltek.com.
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