CFO.com was on site at the 2025 Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference this week, where hundreds of finance leaders gathered in National Harbor, Maryland, to discuss the CFO role’s never-ending evolving demands.
Key themes included the limits of legacy systems, the practical realities of AI adoption and the shifting expectations around finance’s influence on agility, data strategy and digital transformation.
Below are six takeaways from the event.
1. CFOs are increasingly skeptical of ERP mega projects
Gartner highlighted a notable shift away from large-scale ERP overhauls. CFOs are increasingly rejecting multi-year “rip and replace” implementations in favor of modular, phased upgrades that tackle critical areas first. This approach reduces risk, creates a roadmap to ROI and better aligns with evolving business needs. The message was clear: finance transformation should be incremental and agile, not an all-or-nothing investment.
2. The ‘single source of truth’ is a myth
When asked how CFOs are preparing their datasets, Alexander Bant, Gartner’s chief of research for CFOs, told CFO.com in an interview that “there is no such thing as a single source of truth” for CFOs. This statement is in contradiction with lots of takes CFOs and their peers have shared around digital transformations.
Instead of chasing perfect data harmony, Bant recommended that CFOs focus on harmonizing insights across systems and empowering teams to access and interpret the right data for their needs. The emphasis is shifting from centralized control to decentralized enablement for CFOs. This requires a mindset of governance through transparency and a unified understanding of the company’s mission, not uniform datasets.
3. CFOs’ mindset toward finance technology should be to serve the business
Gartner leaders stressed in nearly every session that finance teams are being reimagined as service providers within the organization. While many contemporary efforts among finance teams prioritize efficiency and cutting costs, Gartner leaders recommend that CFOs must now adopt a product mindset. This means treating internal processes like FP&A and reporting as “products” that must evolve based on user feedback and business needs. Gartner leaders said this shift drives agility, collaboration, increases sentiment during digital transformations and creates more responsive tools and workflows.
4. AI adoption must prioritize practical use
There were several sessions focused on turning AI buzz into a tangible impact. CFOs can now see through the hype, articulate the jargon and are cognizant of the sales and marketing influence of AI products. Many CFOs are looking to identify specific, high-value use cases in areas like invoice automation, fraud detection or predictive forecasting. Good CFOs are not chasing generalized AI transformation. Down the line, real success for finance teams using AI depends on aligning use cases to strategy, ensuring data quality and building trust in AI-driven decisions. The goals now are less about the adoption of AI wholeheartedly and more about operationalization and accomplishing specific tasks.
5. Finance has a growing responsibility for organizational agility
Sessions like “Agility Without Chaos” emphasized that finance teams must evolve their structures to respond quickly to disruption, but must do so without sacrificing organizational stability. In practice, this is designing operating models that allow for faster planning and decentralized decision making. Gartner made clear that agility isn’t about moving fast for the sake of it. Rather, it’s about building the infrastructure, tools, data access abilities and team roles that enable sustainable responsiveness to change. CFOs, according to Gartner leaders, are expected to build that system and culture, not just react within it.
6. Human judgment still separates strong and weak CFOs
Even as AI and automation take over more transactional tasks, human leadership remains irreplaceable. CFOs are being counted on to interpret data with context, guide ethical decisions and communicate the “why” behind the numbers. Storytelling is still valuable. The ability to delegate and communicate is critical. Strategic judgment and influence are growing core competencies. In essence, technology can inform decisions, but it’s the business leaders who make them who will lead the way and bear the responsibility for those decisions.
