As chief of research for Gartner’s CFO practice, Alex Bant and his team collect and analyze real-time input from finance leaders to help guide strategic decisions across budgeting, planning, transformation and technology adoption.
In a wide-ranging conversation with CFO.com that took place at the CFO and Finance Executive Conference last week in National Harbor, Maryland, Bant explained how Gartner’s approach differs from traditional consulting and where today’s CFOs are struggling most. From the myth of a single source of truth to the growing role of AI in corporate finance, Bant offered a candid view of what separates good finance leaders from great ones.
He also weighed in on the pressure CFOs face under private equity ownership, how they should be thinking about automation’s impact on the workforce and why the next generation of finance talent may look very different from the last.
Alex Bant
Chief of research for CFOs and global chair of the CFO Finance and Executive Conference, Gartner
- Joined Gartner as CFO Practice leader in 2017
- Author of NOT DOING LIST
- Former adjunct professor at American University’s Kogod School of Business
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
ADAM ZAKI: When I bring up Gartner to my sources, the critique I get is that it’s very prescriptive. That they give you the answers, but they don’t tell you how to do it. So when a CFO comes to you and says, “Alex, that doesn’t work for me. My problem is too unique. I need a custom solution,” what do you say to that person?
ALEX BANT: We, at the end of the day, sell our product to CFOs, heads of FP&A, controllers and finance transformation leaders. Those four individuals — not the team beneath them that’s actually doing the work. At any organization of any size over $100 million, those four individuals are responsible for making decisions.
Gartner provides input on how to make smarter decisions. I always say, for a CFO to keep their job, they have to make at least 51% of the right decisions on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. To be the best executive in the world and run Apple or Amazon, they need to make about 70 to 75% of the right decisions.
We are in the business of helping CFOs move that middle — from the mid-50s to the high 60s — in terms of making more right decisions. That could be allocating capital, deciding what to say to the board, how to communicate with investors, which technologies to buy, how to organize the team, how to allocate resources and how to plan transformation. There are a multitude of decisions in that arena.
Our advice is very prescriptive and actionable at the decision-making level. But we do not go deep into execution mode or help a team member three levels below the CFO get their day-to-day work done. It is not us versus consulting. It is about helping CFOs make smarter decisions so they know when and where to hire consultants.
What advice would you give to a CFO who wants to make sure their data is absolutely perfect before implementing new technology — so much so that their pursuit for perfection may be hindering the process?
What we’ve seen in the CFO priorities year over year is that data and analytics has come to the top of the list. Even more so this year. If CFOs do not have data in a usable format, much of the technology they buy will not give them the full capability or value they expect.
We now advocate for building a strong data foundation, because bad data leads to bad systems. That said, it does not need to be perfect. We are not about a single version of the truth. That does not exist in finance. But the data needs to be usable, with a team around it enhancing, cleaning and preparing it so we can feed more of it into systems piece by piece.
We do think data needs to be set up for success before major technology purchases. You might bolt on something and get some early benefits, but for the massive ERP-type investments, a side-by-side data strategy is essential.
CFOs tell me regularly they need a single source of truth. You’re saying that’s impossible?
It is almost impossible. We rarely see organizations achieve it. We call it a “sufficient version of the truth.” Aiming for that allows us to hit the 80% mark and move forward with large technology purchases without everything being perfect. We are not striving for perfection. We are striving for usability, with a pathway to enhance data on the back end.
Where do you think midmarket CFOs waste the most time?
I think CFOs waste too much time on their finance function. As their organizations grow, scale and become more complex, many CFOs do not elevate to become enterprise leaders. That happens because they lack strong capabilities in accounting, FP&A and tax. Those leaders are not operating autonomously.
So CFOs stay stuck signing off on things, deep in the decisions, giving guidance, involved in hiring, firing and planning. Instead, they should be spending time with the board, with investors and with business unit leaders to chart a cost and growth strategy for the enterprise. They get pulled into the weeds of finance work instead of letting functional leaders operate more independently.
There’s another growing trend in business impacting CFOs — private equity. How would you advise a CFO balancing autonomy and strategic decision-making under a private equity ownership structure?
I always say that even with strict goals, hurdles or processes, there is still room for creativity. We guide CFOs to treat it like a blank canvas. Even when owned or backed by private equity, there is space to design the organization’s future.
The best CFOs take an activist investor mindset inside their own company. Instead of a “you versus them” approach, they act as an internal activist aligned with the private equity team.
The brightest students are choosing other areas of business — or fields like medicine or law — instead of accounting nowadays. With this in mind, what types of new talent should finance leaders be looking for in the future, and do you have thoughts on how to rejuvenate an interest in accounting and finance among young people?
This is where AI comes in. I believe autonomous finance will define the next 30 years. As AI, blockchain and quantum computing take hold, there will be less need for rule-based work like accounting oversight and process control. Anything involving numbers, code or rules will be automated 99% of the time.
We are early in this journey, but I think it’s about time to reframe this question. It is now about being able to acquire the talent to run the technologies that will run the processes. The top talent of tomorrow will be people who can run these systems and layer on creativity to guide the enterprise and unlock future value.
So what do we do with someone like a payroll coordinator? Do we retrain them or upskill them?
This is going to be a fundamental question in every industry. If we have people doing numbers, coding and rules, there will need to be a change — either in job scope, in the job itself or in whether a person or a machine should be doing the task.
CFOs will be forced to make hard trade-offs around individuals being automated out of positions.
There’s a lot of data out there. A lot of noise. How do you learn outside of Gartner data? What are your reliable sources to stay up to date?
I read all of the CFO media out there like CFO.com and CFO Brew. But I have added an AI-influenced strategy lately that has really helped.
We talk to about 10,000 CFOs and their teams each year through our inquiry process. These are 30-minute conversations where they bring a question to an analyst. Most of these are recorded. Years ago, I would listen in on key calls. Now, we put those transcripts through generative AI. Every week, my team shows me the top themes CFOs are asking about and the advice they say they will act on.
Over the last six months, our internal analytics have been powerful in surfacing what CFOs really want. And I spend two to three hours a day in meetings discussing emerging themes, like how cybersecurity hits the CFO. This has been a great way for me to stay in tune with what CFOs are saying about their challenges in real-time.
