A report on AI, automation, and the close — drawn entirely from poll responses collected live across TakeControl 2026.
At TakeControl 2026, we asked. You answered. Over two days, nearly 4,000 accounting and finance leaders responded to polls across 17 sessions — from keynotes to breakouts — generating more than 85,000 data points on how finance teams are approaching AI, automation, the close, and governance today.
Every finding in this report comes directly from what attendees told us in the room. No external survey, no curated sample. Just the real-time responses of the practitioners who were there.
The honest picture on AI maturity across nearly 4,000 finance and accounting teams.
When we asked attendees to describe their organization's current relationship with AI in accounting, almost everyone is paying attention. Only 9% said AI is not on their radar at all.
Sixty percent of respondents are either treating AI as a priority without having acted on it, or running pilots they haven't been able to scale. That gap between intention and execution is the defining characteristic of where the accounting profession sits right now.
We asked attendees to place their teams on a five-level AI Maturity Index. The results were consistent across multiple questions throughout the event.
Three-quarters of teams are using AI to assist or support work, not to execute it. The 4% at Tier 3 — where agents do the work end-to-end — represent where the profession is headed, not where most teams are today.
The roadmap gap is the most cited barrier — more than budget, more than having AI embedded in the close. Most teams know they need to move. The challenge is knowing where to start.
The operational, organizational, and process barriers standing between where teams are and where they want to go.
Before agents can run, processes need to be documented. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said their most automatable process either lives in someone's head, is too messy to hand off, or hasn't been examined closely enough to know.
Only 12% of respondents describe their CFO office processes as truly standardized. The remaining 88% are either working toward standardization, have standards that aren't followed, or have significant variation by team or region.
More than half of attendees said the biggest data burden is simply preparing data instead of doing accounting work. 81% of teams pull from 3 or more systems to run the close.
Half of respondents identified data literacy and analytical judgment as the primary skills gap — more than twice the number who cited AI and tooling fluency. The challenge isn't learning new tools. It's developing the judgment to work with the outputs those tools produce.
More than half of attendees cited operational inefficiency and team burnout as the primary pressure point. The close isn't just a technical problem — it's a people problem.
The workflows, use cases, and investments on the near-term roadmap for accounting and finance teams.
When asked about maximum impact, 84% pointed to either reconciliations or accruals as the top-priority use case. Reconciliations win the CFO impact vote; accruals win the "build first" vote.
Reconciliations and financial reporting together account for 70% of near-term automation focus — high-volume, repeatable, rules-based processes where agents can deliver fast, measurable results.
Half of respondents want to review the work before it posts. This is the profession's core instinct around accuracy and accountability expressing itself in how they think about agent design.
More than half said the primary value of accounting AI is faster, real-time insight — not error reduction, not capacity. Teams aren't looking to escape the close — they want to elevate what they bring to it.
Nearly 8 in 10 respondents see the shift as structural — a change to what accountants do and what skills they need, not just a psychological adjustment. The accounting function is being redefined, and most practitioners in the room understand that.
AI governance hasn't kept pace with AI adoption — and audit season is coming.
When asked what AI governance measures their organizations currently have in place, the most common answer was none.
The governance problem isn't just a policy gap — it's a visibility gap. Before organizations can govern AI use, they need to know where it's happening.
Nearly two-thirds of attendees are heading into year-end still in the exploration phase. That's not a problem today, but it becomes one quickly as auditors begin asking about AI-driven processes.
Nearly half expect to assemble audit evidence manually, after the fact. A further 29% don't yet know what auditors will expect. The infrastructure to produce AI audit trails automatically is what most teams are still missing.
TakeControl 2026 brought together nearly 4,000 accounting and finance leaders at a genuinely pivotal moment for the profession. The data in this report reflects where that conversation actually is — not where the most advanced teams have already arrived.
The picture that emerges is one of a profession that understands what's coming and is working to get ready, while navigating real constraints: processes that aren't documented, data that isn't clean, governance frameworks that are still being built, and skills that are still developing.
Poll responses were collected live during TakeControl 2026 on September 16–17, 2026. All data reflects responses submitted by event attendees across 17 sessions. Total unique respondents: 3,980. Total responses: 85,324. Questions varied by session; not all respondents answered all questions. Sample sizes (n) are noted for each question. Multi-select questions are noted where applicable; percentages may exceed 100% in aggregate.