Most finance chiefs are well-experienced in having to juggle a host of competing priorities, but with so much change in the air, that necessity seems to be reaching a fever pitch looking ahead to next year.
In a survey of 1,326 global finance leaders by Deloitte, in which participants ranked their top three priorities through 2026, five broad but disparate areas of concern were identified as having almost equal importance.
The leading priorities — planning for external challenges like inflation, tariffs and regulation, adopting new technological capabilities and developing new products or services — were all about dealing with a changing landscape.
Similarly, when citing their top current risks, the finance leaders — all at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue — ranked economic uncertainty highest.
And, asked to identify the most important actions for managing uncertainty, more than half of them pointed to enhanced anticipation or response capabilities such as scenario planning and governance models. AI has made such modeling far more sophisticated, Deloitte noted in its survey report.
The findings “suggest that many finance leaders are navigating a number of high-priority risks simultaneously,” Deloitte wrote.
Indeed, the new research sheds light on a Deloitte analysis of CFO job postings in 2024, which revealed that the number of skills CFOs were asked to bring to the table had increased 19% over five years.
“Finance chiefs often walk a razor’s edge between two unrelenting demands: managing cost efficiency, while identifying opportunities to invest in business growth,” the report noted.
There, too, AI is playing an increasingly crucial role. Almost two-thirds (63%) of survey respondents said their company has already fully deployed and is actively using AI solutions in their finance function.
Still, a mere 21% of the finance leaders said they believe their AI investments have so far delivered clear, measurable value, and just 14% said they’ve reached the “additional milestone” of fully integrating AI agents directly into the finance function, Deloitte wrote.
In response, 64% of those polled said they plan to infuse more technical skills and capabilities within their function over fiscal years 2025 and 2026. As another Deloitte survey taken earlier this year revealed, many CFOs are grappling with both a lack of skilled talent and staff resistance to using new technology.
Correcting such issues may prove to be a challenge, however, as finance functions “appear to be getting squeezed at both ends of the labor pool,” the report observed.
That is, the number of CPA exam candidates has fallen sharply over the last decade, while the number of accounting graduates is also dwindling. At the same time, the report cited an AICPA finding that three-quarters of accounting professionals are within 15 years of retirement.
How finance leaders address their talent needs may alter what finance professionals and departments look like in the future, Deloitte surmised.
