For finance leaders, the challenge of balancing a growing list of priorities, mandates, and reporting lines isn’t getting any easier. CFOs play a range of critical roles in their organizations, including (but not limited to) crisis manager, functional leader, and thought partner to the CEO. In our newest CFO pulse survey, finance leaders also cite emerging risks to their companies’ growth—namely, supply chain disruptions and weak demand—that require attention and management.
At the same time, CFOs tend to say they are looking beyond short-term concerns in a way they haven’t in previous years. Most finance leaders cite strategic planning and long-term resource allocation and planning as top finance priorities, and much more often than they did in our 2023 survey. And while few CFOs say their finance functions have digitized their processes at scale or have adopted generative AI (gen AI), nearly all of them believe that gen AI has the potential to create value in myriad ways, from helping finance employees move away from manual analysis to improving leadership and strategy support.
In an increasingly volatile world, CFOs have an especially critical role to play in creating financial value—while also dealing with urgent demands and leading the finance function through the current wave of technology-driven organizational change. They can, and need to, be front and center in helping their companies navigate the current environment by balancing short-term management with long-term value creation. While most finance organizations have just started their gen AI journeys, these technologies also present CFOs, and finance more broadly, with a significant opportunity to increase their effectiveness and efficiency.
