LEADERSHIP

Increase in combined AI machinery spending by major tech giants since last year

Source: Morgan Stanley

HIS YEAR AMAZON, MICROSOFT, ALPHABET AND META will spend a combined US $ 725bn building the machinery of AI, up 77 % on last year and, by Morgan Stanley’ s reckoning, on track to top US $ 1tn in 2027. Amazon alone is budgeting around US $ 200bn, Microsoft close to US $ 190bn. No four companies have ever staked this much on a single idea. One number never makes the slide deck. MIT studied 300 corporate AI rollouts and found 95 % failed to move profit or loss by a single cent. That is 19 of every 20 bets, gone without a trace. The hard question in 2026 is not whether to spend, boards settled that long ago. But rather who decides which bets get funded, and which are strangled in their cribs. Paul Barnhurst, the FP & A specialist who built a following as The FP & A Guy, has watched the finance chair change shape.

“ The biggest shift we’ re seeing is the evolution of finance from a reporting function to a strategic business partner,” he says in an interview with CFI.“ CFOs are no longer expected to simply explain what happened last quarter, they’ re expected to help shape what’ s happening next.”

The 700 who came back For a parable of what the money buys when nobody referees, there is Klarna. In early 2024 the Swedish payments group boasted that its new AI assistant was doing the work of 700

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