Good morning. A new report from TD Bank U.S. finds that employees are embracing AI as a productivity tool, but they’re not ready to hand over decision-making authority.
According to TD’s second annual AI Insights Report, released on Tuesday, 83% of employed respondents said they now use AI-powered tools at work, up 20 percentage points from last year. Adoption rose across both employer-provided tools, rising to 75% from 63%, and independently accessed tools, which climbed to 78% from 66%. Respondents who use AI say it helps them work faster, generate ideas more easily, and make decisions more efficiently. Notably, 71% say AI gives them a competitive edge over peers in similar roles.
For CFOs, the signal isn’t just growing adoption. It’s a broader shift in workforce mindset: AI is increasingly being viewed less as a job threat and more as a performance lever. That has meaningful implications for how finance leaders position AI investments and workforce enablement internally.
The report also offers insight into how AI is reshaping expectations in financial services. Just over half of respondents, 55%, say they use AI to help manage their finances, up sharply from just 10% a year ago. TD’s findings are based on a nationwide survey of more than 2,500 consumers.
Even so, surveyed employees draw a clear line around decision rights. Most prefer AI to surface insights and recommendations while humans retain final authority, mirroring broader consumer sentiment around financial services. Just 18% say they would trust AI to make financial recommendations entirely on its own. Comfort was highest when AI supported behind-the-scenes functions such as product or service recommendations, fraud detection, tracking spending, and calculating credit scores.
“Consumers see real value in AI when it simplifies their experience, without losing the human touch,” according to Jo Jagadish, head of digital banking, payments and contact centers at TD Bank U.S.
Trust, however, is gradually building. Sixty-two percent of respondents say they trust AI to provide honest, reliable, and competent information, up from roughly half last year. TD Bank is also investing accordingly: The bank has roughly 2,500 employees working on AI development and has partnered with Columbia University to provide executive AI training for senior leaders.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Leaderboard
Linda S. Huber was appointed CFO of Accelerant (NYSE: ARX), a risk exchange platform. Her appointment follows a previously announced CFO transition. She brings nearly two decades of experience as a public company CFO. Huber previously served as EVP and CFO of FactSet. Before that, she served as CFO and treasurer of MSCI, and EVP and CFO of Moody's Corporation. Earlier in her career, she held a series of increasingly senior roles in financial services.
Tony Mitchell was appointed CFO of Kalohexis, a clinical-stage biotechnology company. Mitchell brings more than two decades of accounting and finance leadership experience. Before Kalohexis, he served as VP and controller at COUR Pharmaceuticals. Previously, Mitchell served as VP and controller at Jaguar Gene Therapy. He also served in leadership roles responsible for SEC reporting, accounting and tax functions at OFS Management and at Melinta Therapeutics.
Big Deal
The findings: technology accounts for 18% of all enterprise AI queries — and more than three in four of those questions involve tasks a traditional IT support desk would normally handle. Yet they never show up as tickets, meaning the demand is entirely invisible to IT teams and finance leaders tracking costs.
The hidden workload represents approximately $300 million in annual ticket-equivalent IT effort, according to the findings.
The report's key argument: AI query data should be treated as a new source of operational intelligence — a live signal revealing where enterprise tooling, onboarding, and support are quietly falling short.
Going deeper
OpenAI has raised $122 billion in a funding round that values the company at $852 billion, surpassing previously announced figures. The record-breaking round was co-led by SoftBank.
"It's a historic number, but for me, what matters more is what it represents," OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar wrote in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday. "We're building the core infrastructure for AI, making it possible for anyone, anywhere, to build."
Friar said that it's easy to talk about models and products, but compute is the engine behind it all. "With this funding, we can invest at the scale needed to deliver intelligence more efficiently to consumers, to enterprises, and to builders everywhere," she said. "That's the part that keeps me energized. Not just what we build, but what others will build on top of it."
Overheard
"I’ve seen brands lose positions overnight — not because their product changed, but because their content wasn’t structured in a way agents could parse reliably."
—Aviv Shamny, co-founder and CEO of Limy, writes in a Fortune opinion piece titled, "AI agents are already driving 10% of revenue for some brands. Is yours invisible to them?"
