Dive Brief:

• The rising use of artificial intelligence inside of the finance function, combined with a growing demand for data-driven insights from the team and expanding cybersecurity as well as economic concerns, is putting a spotlight on the importance of financial planning and analysis talent and modernization, according to results from Protiviti’s 2025 Global Finance Trends Report released Tuesday.
• AI usage — notably that of generative AI tools — in the finance function more than doubled from last year, the survey of more than 940 global executive and financial leaders found, with 72% of finance organizations reporting that they are currently using AI compared to 34% in 2024. The growing presence of AI is also leading to a corresponding rise in cybersecurity and data privacy concerns among financial leadership, however, which are also still tasked with navigating ongoing economic uncertainty which can impact profitability — areas where a mature FP&A function plays a critical role.
• “It is imperative for CFOs to advance the maturity and sophistication of FP&A from an isolated, spreadsheet-laden capability at the basic end of the spectrum to a more defined, collaborative business process support by robust technology ecosystem tools and resources,” the report states.

Dive Insight:

The importance of the FP&A function has captured greater attention as executive leaders globally continue to navigate a still-murky economic environment alongside the evolution of technologies such as AI.

The focus on FP&A skills and leadership may also be due to the impact of tariffs, which continue to loom large in the minds of finance chiefs: 62% of survey respondents said they believe the finance organization’s ability to prepare reliable financial reporting and forecasting has been “at least moderately impacted” by new and changing tariffs, Protiviti’s survey found.

FP&A also topped the list of areas that require attention due to the impact of tariffs inside the finance and accounting function, indicated by 39% of leaders surveyed. Companies that need to keep pace with changing tariff and trade policies need to be able to access real-time information about their impact, something that puts more pressure on the FP&A team to deliver.

“The need to lock in the talent and secure it so that you can confidently produce the data that's being increasingly demanded from the main finance organization makes that a logical move,” Christopher Wright, global leader of Protiviti’s CFO solutions and business performance improvement practice told CFO Dive in an interview. 

The survey also found the percentage of full-time FP&A employees rose in 2025, growing to comprise 75% of staff compared to 40% in 2024, where it dropped from 78% the previous year, according to the survey. The three years of data show 2024 figures might have been “more of a blip,” Wright said. 

The share of full-time employee figures for areas across the finance function including accounting operations and general ledger, which appear to have dipped in 2024, have risen to normative levels this year, Wright said. He also noted the figures might additionally be impacted by a demographic shift across survey respondents — respondents from U.S. companies made up a larger share of companies this year compared to the previous year, according to survey methodology, and the makeup of public and private company respondents represented has also shifted.

As well as tariffs, access to swift, accurate reporting has become top-of-mind for finance organizations in the AI age — which, while providing new opportunities, also comes with its own set of challenges.

AI, though it only moved up slightly on CFOs’ list of priorities for the year — moving from number 15 last year to number 13 in 2025 —  has a “strong relationship” across all of the top 10 priorities indicated by financial and executive leaders in the survey, Wright said. That includes the security and privacy of data, which was the number one priority indicated across all survey respondents as well as CFOs, according to the survey.

“CFOs, across all forms of organization, realize that cyber is expensive, it's risky and it's interrelated with a number of the other things they do, such as AI or earnings releases or producing information or protecting the assets of the company,” Wright said.

AI, however, is “also becoming a tool that can be used for FP&A, for strategic planning,” Wright said — something that could help to ease some of the “supply and demand” challenges that have cropped up regarding a shortage of talent in the accounting and finance function.

There’s an “inter-generational partnership that's possible when you think about people entering the workforce who maybe know a lot more about how to operate AI, but they'll be working for people who understand what you should and shouldn't do with it,” he said. That partnership, alongside AI itself, will enable companies “perhaps to attract more people to finance, because they can be accountants and data scientists, and also keep them in finance longer than whatever their typical one to two year trajectory might be,” Wright said.