Finance leaders stand at an inflection point. Accelerating technology, persistent geopolitical volatility, and shifting expectations of value creation are forcing a fundamental rethink of the CFO role. The question is no longer whether finance should become more strategic. It is whether CFOs can close the gap between what they know they should do and what their organizations are actually equipped to deliver.
Recent research from the EY Global DNA of the CFO Survey underscores a clear pattern. The future of finance will not be decided by talent or technology in isolation. It will be shaped by how effectively leaders bring the two together. Yet ambition consistently outpaces action, and the human elements that turn tools into outcomes remain under-invested.
Ambition Without Ownership
A majority of CFOs surveyed, 60 percent, believe they should define and shape how their organizations create value. Only a minority, however, currently lead the conversations that matter most. Fewer than 26 percent lead discussions on evolving value drivers, and just 25 percent take the lead on investment decisions where returns are uncertain, indirect, or long-term.
This is not primarily a confidence problem. It is a structural and perceptual one. Only 27 percent of respondents say the business primarily views finance as a strategic partner in value creation. Many finance teams remain positioned as control, compliance, and operational support functions. Operational demands still consume roughly 47 percent of CFO capacity. When the books must close, reports must issue, and controls must hold, strategic bandwidth shrinks.
The consequence is predictable. Finance risks remaining reactive, responding to decisions made elsewhere rather than framing them. In an environment where 77 percent of CFOs expect geopolitical volatility to heavily influence supply chain, investment, and risk decisions over the next year, reactive positioning is a liability.
Measuring What Matters
Parallel to the ownership gap is a measurement gap. Sixty-eight percent of CFOs say they urgently need to reevaluate how enterprise value is measured. Half admit their teams cannot effectively capture the value created by new technologies, roles, and ways of working.
Traditional financial metrics still dominate decision-making even when they poorly capture future or intangible returns. Unclear or hard-to-prove ROI ranks as the top barrier for half of respondents. Benefits that are uncertain, spread across teams, or take longer than typical investment cycles to materialize further complicate the picture.
The practical implication is straightforward. Investments in AI, new operating models, or talent development struggle to secure sustained support when finance cannot articulate their contribution in language the board and investors trust. Qualitative and outcome-linked measures such as decision quality, resilience, speed of insight, customer impact, are needed alongside the familiar financial KPIs. Without them, capital continues to flow toward the easily measured rather than the strategically important.
AI’s Mindset Constraint
Artificial intelligence sits at the center of this tension. Eighty percent of CFOs expect AI-enabled business models to be featured significantly or moderately in their organizations within the next twelve months. Yet only 21 percent rate their finance function’s preparedness to use AI for enterprise value creation as leading or advanced.
The constraint is rarely pure technology access. It is mindset and foundation. Most CFOs still prioritize defensive applications like fraud detection, risk assessment, and process control over growth-oriented ones such as forecasting, dynamic pricing, or resource allocation. Teams further along the readiness curve see substantially more potential in those growth use cases. Those still building basic capabilities remain far more skeptical.
Data quality and bias rank as the single largest barrier to securing investment for new AI tools, cited by 61 percent of respondents. Long-term or unclear benefits and shortages of skills or capacity follow closely. Layering sophisticated models onto unreliable or siloed data simply embeds existing weaknesses at higher speed.
Progressive leaders are reframing the conversation. Instead of asking where AI can be applied, they begin with the business problem worth solving and the value they intend to create. Technology becomes a means, not the starting point. That shift requires finance teams comfortable enough with the tools to experiment, and leaders willing to accept that not every return will fit a classic ROI spreadsheet in the first year.
People as the Multiplier
Technology creates capacity. People determine whether that capacity produces insight, judgment, and decisive action. Here the survey reveals another disconnect. Sixty-eight percent of CFOs say new skills and leadership styles are required. Yet people and culture leadership ranks only sixth among development priorities.
Fewer than 15 percent of respondents describe their teams as highly adaptable, proactive learners, or highly confident with new technology. Transformation outcomes track these human factors closely. Among the small group of organizations whose finance transformations exceeded expectations (12% overall) in the past two years, teams rated as highly adaptable, thriving, and confident with technology were dramatically over-represented.
Leadership pipelines are under visible strain. Thirty-eight percent of CFOs report that they themselves are evolving faster than their leadership teams. More than half call for accelerated development pathways. Without structured stretch roles, deliberate succession planning, and space for continuous learning, capability gaps will widen precisely when the environment demands more.
Collaboration compounds the challenge. Only 29 percent of CFOs describe the culture between finance and other functions as open and enabling. Siloed data and systems, capability gaps, and simple lack of time rank as the top barriers. Intentional teaming such as aligning incentives, clarifying joint ownership of outcomes, and creating room for cross-functional work is no longer optional.
Closing the Gaps
The path forward is not another technology roadmap or another talent program in isolation. It is the deliberate integration of vision, mindset, skill set, and toolset.
First, CFOs must claim clearer ownership of value conversations, especially those involving uncertainty and longer time horizons. Finance’s unique visibility across the enterprise positions it to frame how value is defined before capital is committed.
Second, measurement frameworks must expand. Financial metrics remain essential, but they need to be supplemented with indicators that capture resilience, decision quality, and the contribution of technology and new ways of working.
Third, AI foundations like data quality, governance, and cross-functional integration, must precede ambitious use cases. From that base, leaders can shift from defensive experimentation to a focused set of growth-oriented applications that demonstrably influence commercial outcomes.
Fourth, mindset and adaptability require explicit investment. Psychological safety to experiment, structured learning embedded in live transformation work, and collaboration with HR on the future mix of human and machine capabilities all matter more than most development agendas currently reflect.
Finally, capacity must be freed. Process simplification, automation of routine work, continuous close practices, and selective use of co-sourcing partners are not ends in themselves. They are the means by which finance teams gain the time to partner strategically rather than merely report retrospectively.
The Differentiating Leadership Task
The organizations that will pull ahead are those whose CFOs treat talent and technology as inseparable. Technology without the right mindsets and skills produces dashboards no one trusts and automation that embeds old inefficiencies. Talent without modern tools leaves capable people trapped in low-value work.
The research is unambiguous: successful transformation is human-centric. The leaders who master that paradox will convert finance from a necessary support function into a genuine engine of enterprise value. In a world defined by speed, uncertainty, and continuous change, that conversion is no longer optional. It is the core leadership task of the modern CFO.
How CFOx can Help
CFOx partners with finance leaders to close exactly these gaps. We help CFOs move from insight to execution, clarifying ownership of value conversations, redesigning measurement frameworks that capture both financial and non-financial returns, strengthening team adaptability and leadership pipelines, and freeing capacity so strategic work becomes sustainable rather than aspirational. The result is a finance function that does not merely support the business but actively shapes how value is created and captured. Contact us to learn more.
