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CFOs and other finance executives continue to face growing urgency to build for the future, as technologies like AI reshape business and the speed of innovation accelerates across industries. Yet those same leaders find themselves facing an increasingly challenging external environment: risks including economic uncertainty and supply chain disruption threaten instability for their organizations and cast longstanding strategies in a new light.
One thing is clear: finance should seize a strategic leadership role and innovate traditional tools to drive organizational growth. The days of laser-focusing on cost management and quietly supporting business priorities from the “back office” are over. Finance belongs at the forefront of enterprise growth – and the data shows this shift is already well underway. Deloitte’s inaugural Finance Trends 2026: Navigating the expanded scope of finance report dives into where finance goes from here – and what leaders can do to be successful.
Finance Leaders’ Priorities are Driving a Strategic Agenda
Today’s finance leaders are expected to juggle a number of competing priorities that span planning for external challenges to adopting new technologies and optimizing capital allocations, making their ability to act as strategic advisors increasingly vital to their organizations. Encouragingly, more than half (57%) of surveyed finance leaders reported that they play a lead role in shaping enterprise strategy for their organizations, transforming finance’s reputation from that of a “back-office” function to one that is now integral to driving enterprise growth.
Among leaders’ top priorities, two are tied for first place: planning for external challenges and adopting new technological capabilities, both of which are closely linked to financial executives’ strategic agendas.
Strategic finance leaders continue to prioritize responding to new and evolving operational and macroeconomic risks. Economic uncertainty (26%) ranked as the top risk to manage for surveyed professionals, followed closely by financial reporting (25%) and data privacy (24%). In response to these challenges, financial executives are strengthening advanced scenario planning (30%) and building more agile governance models to support faster decision-making (28%).
Adopting new technological capabilities is just as important to finance leaders, many of whom are leaning into technology to help drive organizational success in the year ahead. In fact, strategically-minded finance leaders are making a significant impact in this area, especially regarding technology adoption and investments. In fact, strategy-influencing leaders (e.g., those who play a leading role in enterprise strategy) were more likely than their strategy-supporting peers (e.g., those who contribute to enterprise strategy in a supporting capacity) to report measurable results and progress regarding cloud adoption (48% vs. 18%) and AI (43% vs. 36%).
In every instance, finance leaders are prioritizing both challenges and opportunities and transforming them into strategic plays to help their organizations drive more business value.
AI and Technology Use is Growing – But Leaders Have an Opportunity to Do More
Technology adoption in finance is moving ahead at a rapid pace, especially among finance leaders with strategic oversight and responsibility over cost management. However, the maturity of AI solutions and implementation of them remains unique and varied, as do the savings tied to these solutions. Sixty-three percent of surveyed leaders have fully deployed and actively use AI. Yet many are still in the process of demonstrating and maximizing these investments: only 21% of financial leaders report clear, measurable ROI from their AI initiatives. Early-stage adopters cite legacy technology (41%) and justifying ROI (30%) as major adoption barriers, while those in advanced implementation stages indicated that data privacy concerns (57%) remain their greatest challenge.
Despite these barriers, leaders remain bullish on AI overall and are approaching the adoption of it with a long-term vision. Case-in-point: even though just 14% of financial executives have fully integrated AI agents, many see significant future opportunities for AI agents in sales and profitability management (48%), working capital optimization (46%), and expense management (44%).
As finance leaders continue to lean into technology — whether it is AI or cloud — it is clear they need to also keep the goal post focused on a few key areas, including demonstrating results, driving efficiencies, and developing a workforce capable of maximizing both of these important measures of success.
Talent and Skills Challenges Remain a Primary Focus for Finance Leaders
Technology is changing the face of talent across all business functions and finance is no exception. As finance leaders adopt new technologies, they recognize the need to reshape finance talent to suit their needs. Many finance leaders (64%) plan to infuse more technical skills – including AI, automation, and data analysis – into their teams in the next two years.
As they look to center these technical skills in their organizations, many leaders are pursuing specialized AI training (39%) to upskill their workforce in addition to hiring more specialized tech talent to help structure finance teams to more effectively capitalize on the combined talents of data science and traditional finance capabilities.
For many finance leaders, today’s talent concerns and how they choose to address them will undoubtedly have significant and exciting implications for what the future of finance could look like.
Where Do Leaders Go From Here?
The Finance Trends 2026 report makes clear that uncertainty and change are the baseline environment for finance professionals today, with no certainty of that changing anytime soon.
The questions on the minds of finance leaders won’t be answered overnight. But by expanding their leadership beyond the realm of the finance function, unleashing the power of AI, and thinking creatively about the talent of tomorrow, finance leaders may hope to build a finance function – and an enterprise – that is poised for growth in any environment.
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