Demand for fractional or interim financial leadership has continued to rise in recent years, boosted earlier by the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently by artificial intelligence. The integration of AI into finance and accounting has already “changed our business dramatically in the last three months,” Jason Hope, fractional CFO and founder of Hope Financial Consulting said.

AI has been “massive” for Hope’s business, a San Diego-based firm which offers consulting and CFO services to mid-market companies, he told CFO Dive in an interview.  “I feel like we're in a totally new world, and six months from now it'll be different still.”

AI opens gates to on-demand talent

Requests for interim C-suite level leadership have jumped 151% since 2021, according to an April report by Business Talent Group, a Heidrick & Struggles company. Demand for interim CFOs has shot up 14% year-over-year, with “financial controls, accounting and audit” proficiencies topping the list of most in-demand skills, BTG’s 2026 High-End Independent Talent Report found.

Digital and AI initiatives also emerged as “a significant cross-functional area of demand” impacting 2026 talent trends, according to the report.  

“These capabilities touch a quarter of all requests (25%) — frequently appearing in initiatives led by strategy, PMO and transformation, finance, and other teams without formal technology ownership,” the report notes.

In his own experience, AI can be “hugely helpful” for tasks such as helping to draft technical memos or some of the day-to-day tasks CFOs don’t necessarily take on themselves, but oversee, such as accounts payable or accounts receivable invoicing — removing time-sucking, routine tasks from the to-do list, Hope said. The way his business has undertaken those tasks has changed dramatically over the past few months, a trend he expects to see continue as AI becomes more powerful and more entrenched, he said.

The added capability AI offers not only enables finance professionals to do more strategic, value-added work, but is also creating more comfort for businesses when it comes to the potential hiring of a fractional or part-time finance chief.

For instance, in his early days as a fractional CFO, “what I found was that once I got the systems and processes in place, a lot of what I did was recurring,” Hope said. “It takes a lot of work and bandwidth; a higher-level person to kind of create those processes and put them in place and change as needed,” he said, but running them month to month requires less input and attention.

Hope founded his company in 2018 because “there are many, many businesses that need expertise from time to time, but don't need it all the time,” he told CFO Dive. Hope Financial Consulting served mid-market companies in industries including e-commerce, commercial real estate and manufacturing. Before founding the company, Hope served three years as a VP of finance and accounting for West Pak Avocado, according to his LinkedIn profile. A certified public accountant, Hope began his career as an audit associate at Big Four firm KPMG.

AI’s steady evolution and continued adoption have helped to get organizations more comfortable with the idea of a fractional or part-time finance chief, Hope said. The advent of AI has helped functions like HR and accounting to follow the path of other functions like IT or legal which big companies were already comfortable outsourcing, creating more trust when it comes to having those functions exist outside of the business, he said.

An AI-enabled finance future  

Hope doesn’t see the continued spread of AI as overtaking the CFO role and, as yet, the technology has not subsumed the demand for fractional or part-time CFO leaders either.

When asked if some of his clients could simply tap AI to conduct the accounting work they hired Hope to do, “they could, and some probably will,” he told CFO Dive, but Hope’s also “been surprised by the lack of desire to do that so far,” he said.

Hope, who charges for his services hourly, sees AI as not a competitor but as a tool to help create stickier, long-term relationships with clients, he said. He has been talking about the benefits of AI tools such as Claude with clients, showing how AI can be used to build out dashboards or drill down on data, he said.

For Hope, AI isn’t replacing CFO-level tasks: “'it’s a new responsibility for the CFO to help the company adopt and to learn it themselves,” he said.