A quarter of corporate executives say errors generated by artificial intelligence tools have made their way to external audiences or company boards, according to a report released on August 11, 2026, that highlights the widening gap between enthusiasm for AI and the safeguards needed to control it.
The finding is one of the headline results from Workiva’s 2026 Midyear Executive Benchmark Survey, conducted with research firm Ascend2, which polled more than 2,000 finance, risk, sustainability and legal professionals alongside hundreds of institutional investors.
The survey paints a picture of executives who are bullish on AI’s potential but underprepared for its risks. Eighty-four percent of executive respondents said they were at least somewhat confident in the accuracy of AI-generated material appearing in an annual report without human review — even as only 11% said their organization’s data quality was sufficient for AI use.
Data quality remains the sticking point
That disconnect could prove costly as companies lean further into AI for financial reporting, sustainability disclosures and investor communications. Seventy-one percent of respondents said poor data quality had at least moderately hampered their use of AI in financial and sustainability reporting, with more than a quarter saying it had significantly blocked deployment in key workflows.
Workiva’s recommendation to corporate clients is blunt: shore up the underlying data and governance before layering AI on top of existing processes. The company urges standardized data definitions, a single source of truth, documented workflows and stronger “context layers” to guide AI systems — rather than treating the technology as a plug-in for legacy reporting.
Investors are watching closely
Institutional investors are not taking AI-assisted disclosures on faith. Eighty-nine percent of investor respondents said they were concerned about the accuracy of AI in company filings, and nearly half said they actively hunt for signs of AI-generated errors in the documents they review.
Governance matters just as much to the investment community as accuracy does. Ninety-six percent of investors said AI governance and human-oversight policies factored into their investment decisions, with 62% describing such policies as “very important” — a signal that boards ignoring AI oversight risk shareholder pushback.
Executives bet on quick returns
Despite the trust gap, corporate appetite for AI payback remains high. Executives surveyed expect measurable returns within 12 months, most commonly in the form of revenue growth (58%) and time savings (47%).
Investors are tracking a broader scorecard. Revenue growth rates were the most cited metric for gauging portfolio companies’ return on AI investment, at 51%, followed by sales conversion rates (42%), internal rates of return on AI projects (40%), management-reported time savings (40%) and automation rates — the share of tasks completed without human intervention (40%).
Workiva argues that capturing durable value from AI will require companies to redesign how work gets done, rather than simply automating existing manual processes.
Limits of the data
The survey did not specify what kinds of AI errors reached boards or external audiences, name any companies involved, or indicate whether the mistakes triggered financial losses or corrected disclosures.
Methodology
The research, conducted in May 2026, surveyed 2,272 finance, risk, sustainability and legal professionals — including 847 C-level executives — at organizations with at least 250 employees or $250 million in annual revenue across North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. A separate poll of 367 institutional investors was carried out across the US, Canada and the UK.
Workiva, a publicly traded software provider whose platform serves finance, accounting, sustainability, risk and audit teams, cautioned that all references to “executives” or “institutional investors” in the report refer strictly to survey respondents, not the broader population.
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