Between the continued evolution of technologies like artificial intelligence, macroeconomic uncertainty, and new regulatory developments, CFOs consolidating their strategies for 2026 are looking forward to a year that promises to be as full of challenges and complexity as ever.

To keep pace, finance chiefs need to ensure they have a full and accurate picture of all of the risks that could potentially impact their organizations — and more importantly, they need to be able to work in tandem with their risk teams to turn that view of risk into an effective plan of action, Tina Yeh, chief accounting officer for AuditBoard, a provider of audit, risk and compliance management software.

“When you're working with your finance teams and CFOs, it's, how do you translate that to the impact on overall margins and the bottom line at the end of the day?” Yeh told CFO Dive in an interview regarding risk management strategies. “Where are the trade offs?”

New tools, new blind spots

One of the challenges Yeh has observed over her career is the “difficulty in translating risk assessments into actionable conversations and how to invest resources into that,” she said.

Yeh “grew up in audit,” she said of her career path, beginning as an assurance associate during a five-year span at Big Four firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

From PwC, she joined workforce software provider Cornerstone on Demand, where she held a number of roles including associate director, accounting, according to her LinkedIn profile. She joined the Cerritos, Calif.-based AuditBoard eight years ago and has served as its CAO since September.

The ability to move from risk assessment into action has only grown more critical as the amount of risks that need to be assessed continues to swell. For example, introducing AI into one’s organizational processes has the potential to free up more time and resources for employees to focus on more strategic work — but the technology also comes with “new blind spots,” especially for finance functions and teams who “really don't yet have clear oversight of how AI is being used,” she said.

AI has continued to be top of mind for leadership over the past year, with finance and accounting teams mulling the best possible usage of the tool at the same time as they seek to guard against its associated risks, from siloed or unstructured data and cybersecurity troubles to the costs and challenges associated with upskilling or retraining employees on how to use it properly.

Identifying a clear strategy to utilize AI will be essential moving forward. CFOs who “think ahead and work with their risk teams on strong AI governance will be the ones that are ahead of the curve, on top of keeping compliant,” Yeh said.

To identify and open up those “blind spots,” both finance and risk leaders need to become more forward-looking in their risk management strategies, making a strong relationship between those two teams essential.

Last month, AuditBoard launched a scenario planning module aimed at addressing some of these challenges, according to a Nov. 18 press release. The module can act as a “facilitation of conversation between the risk teams and the CFOs to be able to get on the same page and speak the same language,” Yeh said.

The tool could be tapped to help organizations assess how ready they are for supply chain disruptions, for example, examining factors from potential material shortages, geopolitical events and cyberattacks to help define a risk scenario and its possible fallout, she said.

Driving the compliance to strategy shift

AuditBoard’s scenario planning module helps CFOs “gain clear visibility into the range of possibilities,” but much more critically, into their financial impact — facilitating “a much more robust conversation between risk leaders and finance,” she said.

That’s key for effective risk management, especially as the rate of change appears to be accelerating alongside the number of risks organizations need to track. The frequency of so-called “black swan” events is accelerating to the point where it’s becoming difficult to differentiate between typical challenges faced by companies, finance chiefs from companies including Hasbro and FedEx said during a panel at MIT Sloan’s CFO Summit in November.

Unlikely events are now becoming simply baked into potential strategies, ready to go when needed, Yeh said. As leaders confront more changes, more frequently, how they think about and respond to risk inside their organizations is also changing.

“We're continuing to see the evolution of risk management from being compliance driven to being a strategic tool for organizations, especially as change accelerates,” Yeh said.