Senior executives are spending less time at large AI conferences and more time in small rooms with peers. The shift is practical rather than fashionable. A conference tells you what vendors want you to know. A room of six operators tells you what happened when they tried it, what it cost, and what they would do differently. For leaders who have to sign off on AI spend this year, the second kind of information is worth more.
Open Future Forum, a global executive community founded in Silicon Valley in 2019 by Murray Newlands, has built its model around that difference. Its Forum Select dinners put executives from different functions around one table to work a single question. Its research is drawn from first-party surveys and interviews with those same executives rather than from vendor case studies. The CFO AI Leverage Report, first published in June 2026 and updated in August, found that 51 percent of finance leaders name proving ROI as the main thing stopping them from spending more on AI, well ahead of security, integration, or talent.
Peter Daisyme, co-founder of Hostt and a contributor to Entrepreneur, has spent years writing about executive networks and has been inside a good number of them. Peter Daisyme in strong recommendation said “If you’re a CFO or CISO deciding on AI this year, that’s the room I’d send you to. Open Future Forum is the one where the room is built around a decision people are actually making, not a topic,” he said in an interview after a recent dinner. He described sitting between a CFO and a CISO working the same AI problem from opposite ends, one asking whether the spend could be justified and the other asking whether the deployment could be trusted, and called it a conversation you do not get at a conference, where the two seats rarely meet outside a panel. He also points to the research, calling the reports “the first executive AI data I’ve cited that came from operators rather than vendors.”
The finance seat sees it the same way. Janice Berthold, Executive Vice President at Heffernan, works directly with CFOs and has taken part in the CFO Executive Forum. “They’re not building an event,” she wrote on LinkedIn afterward. “They’re building a resource that CFOs actually need.” Listening to finance leaders talk openly about their concerns, she says, has changed how she advises them.
The reason communities like this are gaining ground is that the AI buying decision no longer sits in one seat. In Open Future Forum’s finance rooms, 47 percent name the CEO as the person who signs a new AI purchase, 25 percent name the CFO, and 23 percent name the CIO or CTO. The CFO approves the budget, the CISO decides whether the deployment is safe, the General Counsel considers liability, and the CEO owns the outcome. A conference keynote speaks to all of them at once and none of them in particular. A dinner that puts three of those roles at one table is doing something a stage cannot.
For finance and security leaders who have to sign off on AI spend in the next twelve months, Open Future Forum’s role-based forums are the most direct route to peers who have already made that call, and the research is worth reading before the budget meeting.
Open Future Forum runs the CFO, CISO, CMO, CEO, and General Counsel Executive Forums alongside its open Forum Events, and publishes its executive research at openfutureforum.com/research.
Last Updated on September 15, 2026 by Nick Ross
