The Readiness Gap: New 10th Annual FP&A Trends Survey Reveals AI Is Outpacing FP&A’s Foundations

For the 10th consecutive year, the FP&A Trends Group has surveyed the global Finance community. The goal? To track how financial planning and analysis (FP&A) is evolving and what’s still holding it back. The 2026 FP&A Trends Survey, sponsored by OneStream, gathered responses from 475 Finance professionals. With their responses, the total number of participants since the survey began in 2017 hit more than 3,350.

A decade of data gives the 2026 findings particular weight. And the headline conclusion is a sobering one: Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving into Finance faster than the foundations needed to use AI effectively.

“AI is not closing the gap between stronger and weaker FP&A teams,” the report states. “It is widening it.”

Performance is improving — but slowly and unevenly

Five years into tracking team performance, FP&A’s overall maturity has barely shifted. Just 22% of FP&A teams now describe themselves as “optimized” or “performing well.” Meanwhile, another 46% say they “collaborate well but remain held back by manual work.” A further 32% are still merely “coping” or “struggling.”

Part of the explanation is structural: FP&A teams still spend 47% of their time on low-value activities like data collection and validation. As a result, teams have only 32% of the capacity for the insight generation and decision support that actually move the needle. That ratio has improved only modestly since 2019.

The business wants FP&A to see further ahead. The opposite Is happening.

One of the clearest pressure signals in the 2026 data? Predictability is shrinking. Nearly half of organizations (44%) say they can only plan with high confidence up to 3 months out — up 5 points from the prior year. Confidence beyond 6 months has fallen sharply, from 39% to 29%.

Scenario planning tells a similar story. Today, FP&A teams are operating in one of the most volatile business environments in years. Yet only 19% of FP&A teams can run a scenario in real time or within a single day. The capability that should be the bridge to AI-enabled decision-making remains, for most organizations, out of reach.

Data-driven decisions are at an all-time high. So is the data quality gap.

Data is more central to FP&A decision-making than ever: 81% of respondents say decisions are now predominantly data-driven, a record high. But the survey also surfaces what may be its starkest contradiction. Only 19% of organizations describe their data quality as “best-in-class” or “advanced,” and just 11% have real-time or near-real-time access to critical data.

In other words, FP&A is becoming more data-dependent faster than it can manage that data effectively. That gap matters even more once AI enters the picture.

Where AI fits in

The 2026 survey also took a deeper look at how AI is actually being used inside FP&A — and the results reinforce the report’s central thesis. Generative AI usage has reached 21% of FP&A teams, with a further 25% planning to adopt it. Notably, machine learning use in forecasting has recovered to 12%. That’s the highest level in the survey’s history, but the majority of teams have yet to adopt machine learning at all.

Where AI is in use, the association with stronger outcomes is consistent: AI users report better team performance, more time spent on insight generation, and meaningfully higher forecast quality than non-users. But the report is careful to note that the association is not proof that AI alone drives the improvement.

The more likely explanation, in alignment with the report’s central warning? AI performs best where strong data, integrated planning, and disciplined models already exist and simply accelerates the same weaknesses where the models don’t yet exist.

When it comes to what’s next, the tension only sharpens. Agentic AI — tools capable of planning and executing tasks with greater autonomy — is on nearly every team’s radar, but adoption is still mostly aspirational. And in a separate poll of FP&A professionals, the single largest barrier cited to deploying AI agents wasn’t budget or strategy. It was data quality.

What’s inside the full report

The 2026 survey goes well beyond the highlights above. In the full 2026 FP&A Trends Survey, the following findings are detailed:

• How FP&A’s role as a business partner has shifted and why trust hasn’t kept pace with capabilities
• The state of integrated planning, driver-based modeling, and three-way financial statement integration across the industry
• Where outdated systems are quietly limiting AI readiness, including how recently teams have upgraded their core planning technology
• A full breakdown of AI governance maturity and how it differs between high-performing and struggling teams
• The expected timeline and first use cases for agentic AI inside FP&A
• Six practical imperatives FP&A leaders should prioritize now to prepare their teams for what’s next

Download the full 2026 FP&A Trends Survey “The Readiness Gap: How AI Is Testing FP&A’s Foundations” to see all the data, benchmarks, and recommendations.