Reading Room

Finance software vendors are still selling features in a market where the underlying models are commoditizing those features faster than any software company can build. The MIT NANDA project analyzed roughly $30 to $40 billion of enterprise AI spend — 150 leader interviews, 350 employee surveys, 300 public deployments — and found just 5% of integrated AI pilots extracting measurable value. Seventy-one percent of finance teams report low impact from AI investments; 62% of CFOs say fewer than a quarter of their AI initiatives deliver measurable benefits.

The piece identifies two layers to the problem. First: whatever feature a vendor ships today, the next model release does it free. The framing is precise — a 90-day melting ice cube: you pay a premium for something the base model swallows in one product cycle. Second, and more expensive: vendors skip the data layer entirely. They point a chatbot at messy, half-reconciled numbers and let it answer with confidence. The demo works on clean sample data. Production falls apart on yours.

The market is already delivering verdicts. Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, described on June 8 how his company replaced a 20-seat SaaS analytics product by connecting its data directly to Claude — cutting the bill by 90%. IBM lost $31 billion in market cap in a single day in February 2026 after Anthropic announced a COBOL modernization tool. Figma stock is down roughly 50% this year after Anthropic launched Claude Design. Chamath Palihapitiya named the structural ceiling: "You can't rent intelligence from the same place that rents it to your competitor."

The 5% of enterprises getting real ROI share one thing: they own the data layer. Vendors that sit between your ERP and a chart are on the wrong side of a trade they cannot win.