Four in Five UK and Irish Finance Leaders Feel Rushed Into AI Adoption, AccountsIQ Survey Finds
Four in Five UK and Irish Finance Leaders Feel Rushed Into AI Adoption, AccountsIQ Survey Finds #
Four in five senior finance leaders in the UK and Ireland say they are being pushed to adopt artificial intelligence faster than they feel ready for, according to a survey published by cloud accounting software provider AccountsIQ.
The CFO Paradox survey, conducted by Censuswide among 1,036 senior finance decision-makers at businesses with 20 to 500 employees, found that 82% feel under pressure to adopt AI at a pace they are not comfortable with. Of that group, 41% describe the pressure as significant. Fieldwork ran between July and August 2026.
Finance leaders in Ireland reported feeling more rushed than their UK counterparts: 91.5% compared to 80.3%.
The hesitation does not appear to stem from distrust of the technology. Some 81% of respondents said they fully or mostly trust AI-driven outputs in finance processes, and 92% said they could explain how an AI-generated output was calculated.
Darren Cran, CEO of Dublin-based AccountsIQ, attributed the pressure to boardroom expectations and wider media discourse rather than operational readiness. “Finance leaders are being asked to move on AI at the speed of the conversation around it,” he said. “The discussion of AI starts in the boardroom and the press, and finance is expected to have an answer. Most finance leaders already trust what AI produces, so the hesitation sits with how quickly they can bring it in with the controls they need.”
Concerns about over-reliance also appeared in the findings. Three in four respondents (76%) said they were worried their organisation could become too dependent on AI for decisions that were previously human-led.
The survey found that roughly 27% of UK finance teams have no AI features in place. AccountsIQ recommended that finance leaders set their own implementation timetables rather than respond to external pressure, build verification mechanisms such as error checks and audit trails from the start, and maintain human oversight before expanding AI’s role in decision-making.
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