Today’s leading chief financial officers are thinking differently, operating differently, and hiring differently. They’re helping navigate new markets, preparing for acquisitions and divestures, and building future-ready teams. But they’re contending with a complex growth environment.
How are finance leaders preparing their teams to proactively address these complexities, and build for the future?
Deloitte released Top 5 trends likely to have the most direct impact on finance leaders, the finance function, and by extension, the rest of the organization through 2026. Collectively, these trends illustrate the integral—and increasingly more prominent—role finance leaders are often playing in helping their organizations optimize costs, catalyze innovation, and orchestrate a strategic agenda that fuels enterprise-wide growth and value.
1. Advanced scenario planning and agile governance for navigating uncertainty
Localized pressures, such as labor shortages, combined with cross-border challenges, are among the business factors contributing to higher costs, and can throw global sourcing into disarray.
In tandem, it may be increasingly difficult for finance leaders to keep pace and identify the most important investments to help fuel growth and innovation. Three-quarters of the leaders surveyed say their organization requires either a moderate amount or “a lot more” resources to maximize investment opportunities across the business.
Planning for external challenges; adopting new technological capabilities; and protecting resources by reducing costs remain the Top 3 priorities.
Economic uncertainty ranked highest (26%) risk, followed by financial reporting and disclosure requirements (25%), data privacy regulations (24%), and tax regulations (22%). Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions and supply chain disruptions—tied for sixth place at 21%.
Asked to identify their plans to help manage uncertainty, respondents cite the need to bolster advanced scenario planning capabilities (30%) and build more agile governance models to support faster decision-making (28%). Among other top strategies, 25% of respondents plan to leverage AI-driven insights to guide better decisions and 18% expect to invest in dedicated risk management teams.
Some finance leaders are establishing new governance structures to help empower teams to respond to their environments more quickly.
More than half of survey respondents (57%) say they are now among the top leaders influencing strategy development across the organization.
2. Finance leaders are stepping up as strategy leaders
A 2024 Deloitte analysis of CFO job postings revealed the number of skills CFO applicants were asked to bring to the table increased 19% over a five-year period. At the same time, the share of CFOs expected to have a strong grip on risk management more than doubled, according to the same analysis. Overall, many finance leaders are holding greater accountability for driving business outcomes where they can orchestrate collaboration and drive transformative growth.
More than half of survey respondents (57%) say they are now among the top leaders influencing strategy development across the organization. Notably, these strategy-influencing leaders also handle a broader scope of responsibilities: Across nine categories, they average 20% more responsibilities than other respondents.
Nearly half (48%) say they’re deploying cloud-based solutions to help optimize costs across their organizations vs, 33% of finance leaders who are in strategy-supporting roles.
Strategy-influencing respondents also seem further along in their AI journeys. They’re more likely to use AI to help address current shortfalls in productivity compared to respondents operating in a strategy-supporting role (43% vs. 36%). More than one-third say they’re already delivering clear, measurable value from their AI investments compared to those in a strategy-supporting role (37% vs. 17%), and nearly half (48%) say they have fully integrated AI agents into specific areas of the finance function, compared to 18% of supporting respondents.
3. How finance-led cost management helps drive measurable value
When finance leaders own cost and expense management, what can set them apart are the tools they bring to cost discipline along with a focus on accountability. Just over one-third (36%) of finance leaders surveyed (and 42% of CFOs surveyed) are primarily responsible for cost and expense management for their organizations. Yet these leaders are more likely to consistently meet—or exceed—their cost-savings goals compared to respondents who say they play a supporting role in enterprise cost management (47% vs. 39%).
Respondents taking greater ownership of cost management often bring together cloud infrastructure, intelligent automation, and specialized in-house expertise to help strike a balance between growth and cost control.
While 51% of respondents who own cost management are deploying cloud solutions to optimize costs, just 36% of their counterparts in supporting roles are doing so.
For instance, in Deloitte’s 2025 MarginPlus survey, the Top 2 internal barriers to organizational success are the “inability to enable digital infrastructure to meet new external business conditions and scale” (49%) and a “lack of flexibility in existing assets and infrastructure to respond to external demand” (45%).
For these cost and expense owners, 49% say they are likely to use AI to identify cost-reduction opportunities, compared with 40% of finance leaders in a supporting role.
4. Many finance teams embrace AI, but ROI and agentic implementations often lag
The survey shows that nearly every finance department is at least experimenting with AI use cases: In fact, 63% of respondents say they have already fully deployed and are actively using AI solutions in their finance function. Yet, for many, there is still runway to amplify the reach and measurable impact of their AI investments. For instance, among respondents actively using AI solutions, only 21% believe those AI investments have already delivered clear, measurable value; and only 14% have reached the additional milestone of fully integrating AI agents directly into the finance function
And, 41% of early-stage teams report legacy technology as a barrier to AI adoption, compared with 31% of “AI leaders”—respondents who have deployed AI solutions, delivered measurable value from those solutions, and have already integrated AI agents into the finance function. Notably, several of the finance leaders say they are actively going through a digital transformation to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to provide greater flexibility and access to insights. But they also acknowledged that this is a multiyear journey.
In addition, some respondents report that with AI adoption, proving a return on investment is challenging within the finance function. This survey found that 30% of finance leaders in the early stages of AI adoption struggle with justifying ROI, compared with 21% of those further along the AI journey, or AI leaders.
Data security concerns reign near the top of respondents’ list of AI implementation challenges. This appears especially true for respondents who are AI leaders: 57% cite data privacy as a top challenge vs. 44% for those earlier on their AI journey.
Several interviewees stressed that data privacy is particularly relevant in finance, where teams handle some of the organization’s most sensitive data.
Agentic systems can also help finance leaders under pressure move more efficiently on critical tasks. Our survey shows three assistive areas where respondents see the greatest opportunity: sales and profitability management (48%); working capital optimization (46%); and expense management (44%).
5. Infusing tech talent in finance
Almost two-thirds of respondents (64%) say they plan to infuse more technical skills and capabilities within their function over fiscal years 2025 and 2026. This finding jibes with Deloitte’s Q1 2025 CFO Signals survey, in which finance chiefs listed lack of skilled talent, along with employee engagement, staff resistance to using new technology, and work overload, as the biggest workforce challenges in meeting C-suite expectations for their finance departments.
Topping the list of the skills many surveyed finance leaders are prioritizing for the next fiscal year are AI and automation, along with data analysis and technology integration. Core business and finance skills, such as strategic decision-making, cost-management expertise, regulatory and legal compliance, and business planning and forecasting, appear lower on the priority list for development. Leadership and adaptability and advanced scenario modeling garner similar response rates as these more traditional finance capabilities, indicating how much emphasis some finance leaders may be placing on making their organizations more agile and responsive to rapid change.
After utilizing AI and automation to attempt to address productivity gaps (40%), respondents say they are employing an array of internal and external initiatives to train current professionals, source new talent directly into finance, and structure teams to most effectively capitalize on the combined talents of data science and traditional finance professionals.
In their attempts to find the right skills within their organizations, 39% of respondents say they are providing specialized training to upskill the workforce. Some finance leaders are looking beyond their own walls to find talent: 35% of respondents say they are considering candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, and another 28% are “insourcing” talent from other departments.
