CFO and the C-Suite

As businesses look to navigate ongoing change, including stormy economic seas and geopolitical pressures, they’re leaning harder on their tax and finance functions to help drive strategy and craft value.

To fulfill that growing responsibility, finance leaders are shifting the way they think about the hiring, training and retention of top talent: according to a recent survey of finance and tax executives released Nov. 19 by Big Four firm Ernst & Young, 89% of respondents are looking to upskill their existing workforce over the next two years. That requires a “fusion” of not just core accounting or financial skills — although those are still critical — but of technological and data chops as well, Stuart Lang, global tax and finance operate leader for EY told CFO Dive.

“How do we actually put our training program in place to not replace but upskill, recognizing that the skills of tomorrow are different from the skills of the past?” Lang said in an interview alongside his colleague David Helmer, partner, global managed services, EYEA LLC.

Finding the intangible

Finance leaders are seeking to upskill their teams at a time when those teams are expected to provide key insights into planned deals, supply chain changes or scenario planning: a capability 79% of respondents identified as a top priority over the next two years, EY’s 2025 Tax and Finance Operations survey found. The survey was conducted between July and September and fielded responses from 1,600 tax and finance executives, including CFOs and heads of tax.

“Companies are continuing to look at, how do I become more strategic?” Helmer said. “How can I get my team to spend at least as twice as much time on high value strategic activities and reduce the time [spent on] routine compliance activities?”

CFOs are also faced with providing strategic clarity at a time when businesses are continuing to face challenges related to ongoing macroeconomic and geopolitical change, Helmer said. For instance, EY’s survey found 81% of companies plan to make changs to their supply chain processes based on geopolitical changes — shifts that will impact tax results, and the tax function in turn, he said.

Those changes are combining with a continued “widening of the talent gap with not as many accountants entering the industry that’s putting a strain on the function,” Helmer said. Tax leaders expect both growing retirement and a winnowing pool of graduates to affect their functions; 61% of leaders, for example, said the retirement of senior tax professionals will “significantly impact” them.

In such an environment, technical skills are still extremely important, Helmer said, but more and more companies are looking to complement those skills.  

Finance leaders are beginning to look toward more “intangible” skills in examining future hires, with 81% of respondents stating they are hiring individuals with proficiencies “other than tax technical skills,” EY’s report found. Problem-solving and critical thinking skills were cited by 85% of respondents as the most essential to develop for future tax professionals.

Additionally, as AI continues to seep further into businesses and as companies look for new skills, “we see companies looking to hire more diverse capabilities within the tax and finance functions,” Helmer said. Many are looking to data scientist or AI specialists to “strengthen that team with people that can work side by side” with traditional accountants or tax professionals, he said.

Gaining data trust

Finding the right mix between finance and data skills is essential for finance teams that need to become increasingly strategic in an AI-first world. As the promise of AI is realized, for future professionals in these areas, “being able to translate the data the AI is telling them, apply it to a business context and make recommendations to their business and their clients is super important,” Lang said.

Eighty-six percent of companies ranked being able to tap generative AI and technology to drive innovation and insight as a top priority: however, only 16% said they were “very confident in their ability to execute on their data strategy and not even one in four say they have a high maturity of data management in their tax function,” EY’s survey found. Additionally, 64% cited the lack of a sustainable plan for data and technology as the reason behind their inability to deliver on their function’s “vision and purpose,”

“How do we take large data, how do we fill gaps in the data, and how do we automate the processes and train automation?” Lang said. “So I still think there is a level of trust, [there’s] still a short barrier in finance that's got to be overcome.”

Change is a constant — and with the continued evolution of artificial intelligence, a shifting regulatory and economic environment, and new ways of working, it’s a more frequent constant than ever. These were some of the questions top finance chiefs — including FedEx CFO John Dietrich and Hasbro CFO and COO Gina Goetter — grappled with during a conference last week. 

Today’s CFOs know they must be prepared for change, but as black swan events proliferate, that means being prepared for “everything and anything,” Dietrich said during a panel at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s 2025 CFO Summit. 

While finance chiefs today are the ones tasked with ensuring their companies can juggle a number of different risks while still steering toward growth, established organizations tend to be “remarkably inertial beasts,” Nelson Repenning, a distinguished professor of organization studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management said during an opening keynote Thursday. 

To effectively shepherd their organizations through present and future changes, CFOs need to start thinking differently about everything from how they are training and interacting with their teams, using AI, and managing risk. During the conference in suburban Boston, CFOs, finance and other business leaders discussed how these and other changes are impacting their roles now and how they could change the CFO role in the future, as well as what finance chiefs can do to be best prepared for such shifts.  

Here are some of the top takeaways from the event.

All eyes are on AI — but not all hands

AI retained its crown as the main topic on everyone’s minds — but though finance chiefs are still experimenting with and investing in the technology, the right use cases and applications of the technology, especially in areas like finance, still remain murky. 

As CFOs are inundated with a dizzying array of new AI tools promising to enhance their companies’ workflows, they need to ensure they have answers to critical questions — including actually defining what counts as AI, Jason Child, executive vice president and CFO for semiconductor business Arm Holdings said during a keynote fireside chat last week. Many of the tools present are “currently more automation than AI,” Child said, making it essential that CFOs peer beyond the hype.

In examining new AI tools that could be integrated into the business, CFOs need to ensure they understand the full capabilities of those solutions — and where they mesh, and more importantly don’t fit, with those of finance.

For instance, finance is “deterministic,” while large language models are “probabilistic,” he said, meaning an LLM will provide the highest probability of a right number — while not necessarily providing the right number. As such, CFOs need to understand “where I can trust [the LLM] and where I can’t,” he said. Another critical question finance chiefs need to ask is, “how clean is your data?” Child said.  

Social, storytelling skills rise in priority  

AI on its own has tremendous promise: but AI plus humans with strong analytical, interpretative or creative skills is a combination with even more potential, CFOs said repeatedly during the summit. Though AI could potentially remove a large amount of manual, time-consuming tasks from employees’ dockets, it’s crucial for leadership to continue to entice and retain top talent even in the AI age.

The dawn of AI has drawn some of the process issues that have longed faced businesses into higher relief, MIT professor Repenning said during a keynote speech. While large, established organizations may have plans to utilize new tools to free up time and money, they tend to stumble on the change management aspect — in part because they have an opaque view of their teams’ workflows.

“What happens when we take essentially static processes and we use them to try and manage a fundamentally dynamic world?” Repenning asked. In the face of rapid change, the assumptions and predictions made by companies quickly fall out of line with current events and challenges, “and then what happens is, all of the people who work for you, because they are smart, they are talented, they are well-intentioned, what they do is, they work around those processes,” he said.

As such, strong social networking and narrative skills are becoming more critical and highly-sought after among employees: CFOs themselves highlighted the critical role such skills played in their own careers. During a discussion on the rising number of pathways one can take to the top finance seat nowadays, panelists pointed to adaptability, a willingness to try out new things and a focus on sharpening their narrative or storytelling skills as factors that led them to their own CFO chairs.  

One of the biggest learning curves of Jama Software CFO Marc Litz’s career was learning to tailor the financial story to the audience you’re talking to, he said during the panel. In communicating quarterly results, for instance, CFOs are speaking to several different groups, including their own internal teams, the board, and external investors, “and so the biggest nuance in communicating those results, it’s the same story but the level of detail you go into is markedly different,” he said.

CFOs continue to absorb operations

As businesses look to navigate an expanding fleet of risks — including ongoing economic headwinds as well as regulatory shifts — the CFO is emerging as the leader often tasked with steering the ship. Dual roles, such as CFO and chief operating officer or CFO and president combinations, are swiftly becoming more common as the finance chief absorbs a higher level of responsibility for overall business strategy.

Hasbro CFO and COO Gina Goetter doesn’t see her role at the toy giant as being two distinct positions, she said during a panel — rather, it’s a blended role that straddles the line neatly between two complementary areas.

“There’s really no decision operationally that doesn’t wind up in a financial statement somewhere,” Goetter, who joined Hasbro as its CFO and COO from Harley Davidson, said during a panel.

Scott Roe, a fellow CFO and COO who serves in those seats for Coach and Kate Spade owner Tapestry, noted the combination of roles also depends on the personalities and company cultures involved. Roe, for instance, logged experience with supply chain and technology, and so it was a natural progression to take on operational responsibilities when the prior COO left, he said.

However, to effectively fulfill both those operational and finance responsibilities, Roe stressed the importance of skilled talent: “you have to have strong people, and you have to learn to delegate,” he said.

“One of the hardest things that I had to learn as I became a C-suite executive…was, ‘you know the answer, don’t give it,’” he said during the panel, quoting one of his mentors. “You’ve got to develop people, and let them run.”

Once more into the black swan breach

Finance chiefs are used to scenario planning for the best and worst of circumstances, especially as the rate of so-called “black swan” events has continued to increase over the past few years. The growing frequency of such events puts a premium on swift and accurate forecasting, but it has also left some CFOs to expect the unexpected — and to plan accordingly.

Black swan events are becoming so common, in fact, that it’s difficult to differentiate them from the challenges that are popping up every day, finance chiefs said during the summit.  

“What is a black swan event, at this point?” Goetter said in the panel together with Tapestry’s Roe and FedEx CFO and EVP John Dietrich. Goetter’s first CFO role, when she took the top finance seat for Harley Davidson in 2020, was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, an experience which taught her that “you have to have lots of scenarios, you have to be super agile, and you can’t get paralyzed by analysis paralysis.”

The rising frequency of black swan events has also put a spotlight on supply chain, FedEx’s Dietrich said during the panel:  “supply chain is a term that you never heard in the board room ten years ago, and now it’s paramount,” FedEx CFO said.

A former lawyer whose past experiences include serving as a litigation attorney for United Airlines, Dietrich pointed back to events previously highlighted in “force majeure” clauses in past contracts he had drafted — and noting “pretty much everything” outlined in such clauses has occurred over the past two decades.  

“My point is, we should expect everything and anything is going to happen and plan for it,” he said.

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All roads in business lead to finance. But decades-old words like “steward,” “fiduciary,” “historian,” and “gatekeepers” barely capture the breadth of the modern CFO role. More accurate descriptors include “strategic partner,” “growth catalyst,” “risk strategist,” and “transformation leader,” reflecting the increasing complexity of business itself. This article examines how the CFO role has changed and where it’s headed next.

How Has the CFO Role Changed?

Today’s CFOs have a wide remit. According to 95% of North American CFOs, their role has significantly expanded from managing the books to taking on a vast range of responsibilities—including cybersecurity, corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), environmental and social governance (ESG), and even IT.

As a result, CFOs now spend less time on traditional accounting responsibilities and more time shaping business strategy. They depend increasingly on their financial controllers to close the books while they translate numbers into narratives that align with business goals. That means reporting what happened, why it matters, and what comes next to board members and investors, who expect these executives to connect financial performance to business objectives in plain language.

Technology is fueling much of the shift, as CFOs implement automated systems that deliver real-time insights in minutes, not weeks. Indeed, they’re leading IT initiatives, choosing platforms, and overseeing digital transformations that once belonged solely in the hands of the company’s CIO.

In turn, CFOs have begun to view risk management beyond the bounds of financial exposure; data breaches, supply chain disruptions, and regulatory changes across multiple countries demand their direct attention as well. They’re also the voice of financial reality in sustainability discussions, quantifying the costs and benefits of ESG initiatives.

Organizationally, the reporting relationship has changed, too. CFOs now work directly with CEOs on growth initiatives, over and above the cost control aspect. They evaluate new markets, assess acquisition targets, and make build-versus-buy decisions on technology investments. Their comprehensive contribution across the company helps explain why the path from CFO to CEO is becoming well-traveled. In fact, in 2024, 34% of departing CFOs moved to higher leadership roles as president or CEO, up from 20% in 2023. This makes sense—evolved CFOs already run half the company. They understand operations, technology, and human capital as deeply as they understand the balance sheet.

CFO vs. CFOO

The emergence of the chief financial and operating officer (CFOO), which merges the CFO and COO positions into one, demonstrates how the CFO role has evolved.

CFOOs handle all the standard CFO responsibilities—financial reporting, compliance, and capital allocation, for example—plus operational execution, supply chain management, and process optimization. CFOOs run both the numbers and the processes that generate them. The essential skills befitting this hybrid C-suite role dovetail significantly. Both jobs entail data analysis, resource allocation, problem solving, business acumen, industry expertise, and performance measurement. A benefit of this combined position is that it eliminates any CFO-COO friction that might otherwise slow decision-making by creating a single point of accountability for both financial results and operational efficiency. One executive, two hats, faster execution.

CFOOs are best suited to midsize companies where operational complexity remains manageable. Larger enterprises typically maintain separated roles, due to scale and because they can generally afford to. Private-equity firms particularly favor the CFOO model—one versatile leader costs less than two specialists, yet preserves strong oversight.

Key Takeaways

• CFOs are expanding their influence beyond finance and accounting, helping to drive growth and shape company strategy.
• New responsibilities include leading M&A, managing cybersecurity risks, overseeing stakeholder relations, and driving ESG initiatives.
• Three fundamental shifts, including AI as a core competency, will make or break CFOs in the future.
• Cloud-based platforms that unite finance and operations give CFOs the integrated information needed to take on their elevated role.

As companies move from investments in generative artificial intelligence to building out and offering the solutions that will be powered by it, it’s crucial for leadership to have a clear-eyed understanding of what AI can actually do in the present, Brian Zander, vice president of marketing for knowledge management platform Bloomfire told CFO Dive.

When it comes to implementing AI, “I think where the missteps happen is if you have over-inflated expectations of what AI is going to do for you, or if you are not clear about how you’re going to measure that impact and translate that into a cash value right from the get go,” he said in an interview.

To avoid those hurdles, leaders like the CFO and the chief information officer need to be sure they’re covering each other’s blind spots in those areas. CIOs, for example, may often “jump to level four or five” when it comes to AI’s maturity curve, and “they miss the fact that you have to lay the foundation first,” Zander said. “And CFOs don’t really love the idea of laying the foundation because that means longer time to value.”

Cracking the AI value nut  

Attention on AI’s potential has only sharpened in the three years since OpenAI launched its ChatGPT tool, especially as a murky economic environment has led more businesses to look to technology to address cost and labor challenges.

Those same challenges, however, are also causing many leaders to ask deeper questions as they seek to look beyond the AI hype. CFOs, for instance, are still keeping their eye on the tool’s return on investment.

For anyone selling AI as part of their software currently — including Bloomfire, which provides an AI-powered knowledge-management platform — “I think there’s an element of hype in almost everything, because we talk about the future of what your company can be, and CFOs really care more about like, ‘Okay, well, show me the money,’” Zander said. “‘What is that going to be today or in the next six months, or when I have to give my next quarterly report?’”

Bloomfire is the latest avenue in a career path that has often led Zander to be “the person who's involved in big transformational initiatives at companies,” he said of his past experiences. Zander joined the Austin, Texas-based Bloomfire in April 2023 as VP of marketing, according to his LinkedIn profile. His past roles include serving as president for Resurrection Gaming Company and a seven-year span at the Librizol Corporation in roles such as director of strategic intelligence.

To execute on a successful AI implementation strategy, CFOs and CIOs each need to have a transparent understanding not only of the company’s objective in implementing the technology, but of how the business is going to measure the success of that objective, Zander said. An easy source of frustration, for example, is when “things get stuck in pilot hell,” or when technologies get implemented, “but you don’t get the adoption by the teams that you’re trying to implement it with,” he said.

“That's a hard nut to crack if you're in a CIO’s position, because you're saying, ‘well, look at all of the things that we are doing with AI, and the CFO is saying, ‘Yeah, but that’s not translating into dollars,’” he said.

Putting the end user first

Finding a middle ground between the risk and reward of AI means CFOs need to get a little more comfortable with risk, while CIOs may need to keep a tighter eye on how the technology is actually being put to use. Both leaders need to watch out for possible misunderstandings about AI’s uses and potential, he said.

 “I think CFOs have a tendency to overestimate AI's capabilities when it comes to messy data,” both structured and unstructured, Zander said. The mistake CIOs often make, meanwhile, is “they develop the tool for the tool’s sake,” without considering the end user, he said.

“CIOs get frustrated because they're like, ‘but look at all the great things that you can do with this tool,’” he said, but “they didn't think about who the user was going to be and how the user is going to get their job done better with that tool.”

As AI seeps further into businesses’ processes and products, having tech and finance be in lockstep is only going to get more critical.

“I absolutely think that technology investments do have a direct input on the value that a company can produce,” Zander said. “I think that technology 100% impacts the human performance side of things, and the CFO should be measuring that in a very real way.”

Security budgets are under more scrutiny than ever. While cybersecurity remains a board-level priority, the pressure to “do more with less” is intensifying, especially for CFOs balancing cost discipline with strategic investment.

On average, cybersecurity budgets grew just 4% in 2025, down from 8% the year before, a reflection of growing economic uncertainty and shifting C-suite priorities.

At the same time, AI is reshaping enterprise strategy, but not without concern. About three-quarters of finance leaders believe AI introduces security and privacy risks that could threaten their organization’s financial health. That risk-aversion could stall innovation, even as many CFOs view AI as a key driver of transformation in the years ahead.

Here is the opportunity: CFOs and chief information security officers have more in common than they think. Both are stewards of enterprise risk. Both are accountable to the board. And both are under mounting pressure to quantify results. When they align, cybersecurity evolves from a cost center into a competitive advantage, a lever for resilience, efficiency and performance.

CFO-CISO collaboration gap

Despite sharing responsibility for enterprise risk, CFOs and CISOs often do not collaborate effectively due to differences in language, metrics and perceived value.

Viewing cybersecurity as an ongoing cost only is not strategic. This is especially true when security investments are framed without clear ties to business outcomes or operational impact. Without quantifiable metrics that translate risk into financial terms — like how each dollar spent reduces business disruption, improves uptime, or avoids regulatory and reputational costs — CFOs are left with little to justify increased or sustained spend.

CISOs must move beyond technical jargon and translate cyber risk into metrics that matter to the CFO. At the same time, CFOs must also evolve to see cybersecurity as more than protection; it is resilience.

A useful shift is to evaluate cybersecurity investments through a “value per dollar” lens — how much risk is being mitigated relative to what’s being spent. This allows finance leaders to compare security decisions with other business initiatives using familiar ROI frameworks.

Many Fortune 500 organizations are already treating security as a strategic advantage and backing it with data their CFO can take to the board. By managing residual risk to a mature level and showing an impressive value-per-dollar ratio, they have shown how cybersecurity investments can yield measurable business outcomes.

A 5-step playbook for CFO–CISO alignment

The following are five keys for improving CFO-CISO partnerships: 

1. Speak a common language. CISOs must translate cybersecurity into financial terms (cost per incident, risk reduction ROI, and operational impact) while CFOs should understand that not all security value is immediate or visible.
2. Define shared KPIs. Metrics like “mean time to respond,” “cost per threat mitigated,” or “coverage of critical assets” create accountability and alignment across both teams.
3. Prioritize consolidation projects. Work together to identify overlapping tools and vendor sprawl. Consolidation can free up budget and improve visibility, a win for both finance and security.
4. Quantify residual risk. Frame cybersecurity investments in terms of how much risk they reduce relative to board-approved thresholds. This helps justify spending with measurable impact.
5. Plan for the long game. Do not just budget for compliance. Invest in capabilities, like automation and AI, that scale with the business and reduce long-term costs.

CFO-CISO alignment should be seen as a competitive advantage. As financial pressure and cyber risk rise in parallel, organizations must treat cybersecurity as a strategic investment, not just an ongoing cost. The path forward is clear: partner, translate risk into value, and invest in cybersecurity that delivers measurable dividends.

Spirit Aviation Holdings, parent of Spirit Airlines, said its CEO Ted Christie — a 13-year company veteran —has exited the carrier Monday and is stepping down from its board, according to a securities filing. The departure comes weeks after the airline emerged from a bankruptcy restructuring. 

The Dania Beach, Florida-based company said three senior executives will form the office of the president that will “lead the company” until a new CEO is appointed. The group includes Fred Cromer, executive vice president and CFO, John Bendoraitis, executive vice president and COO, and Thomas C. Canfield, senior vice president general counsel and secretary.   

The company also said Monday that Matt Klein, executive vice president and chief commercial officer, will be stepping down, effectively immediately, and be succeeded by Rana Ghosh, who joined the company in 2015 and has served as senior vice president and chief transformation officer since June 2024,. 

On March 12, about five months after filing for bankruptcy protection, the company said it had emerged from its financial restructuring and completed a consensual “deleveraging transaction that equitizes approximately $795 million of funded debt.” At the time, Christie said the the company was now in a stronger financial position.  

"Throughout this process, we've continued to make meaningful progress enhancing our product offerings, while also focusing on returning to profitability and positioning our airline for long-term success. Today, we're moving forward with our strategy to redefine low-fare travel with our new, high-value travel options," Christie said in a statement.

On Monday, Robert Milton, Spirit Airlines’ chairman, thanked Christie for his “tireless efforts” during his tenure at the company.  “He has seen a lot and done a lot during his tenure here, including navigating the company through the COVID crisis and multiple strategic junctures, as well as most recently, a corporate restructuring,” Milton said. “He has kept the company together through challenging times, and for this we wish him all the best going forward.” 

The budget carrier filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Nov. 18, pivoting to reorganize after other efforts to reduce cost and navigate industry headwinds failed. As of the petition, the airline had $3.6 billion in total outstanding debt, 21,000 employees and independent contractors, and a fleet of 213 A320 aircraft, 51 of which were owned by Spirit, CFO Dive previously reported.

In a bankruptcy court first-day declaration filing in November, Cromer described a company with Midwestern routes that was founded in 1964 as Clippert Trucking Company, a Michigan corporation that relocated to Florida in 1994, and took the Spirit Airlines name in 1992. 

Spirit began operating what Cromer characterized as an “ultra low-cost carrier” nearly 20 years ago. Its business model entailed unbundling components of airfares that were typically included in airline tickets, allowing its flying customers to “save by paying only for the amenities they choose, such as baggage, seat assignments, priority boarding refreshments, and WiFi.” 

Cromer, who took the finance reins of Spirit in July, is a 30-year veteran of the airline industry. He was previously CEO of Xwing, a developer of advanced autonomy systems for aviation and defense, and has served as president of Bombardier Commercial Aircraft, president of International Lease Finance Corp, and vice president and CFO of ExpressJet Airlines.

As technologies like AI continue to evolve, business leaders need to make a series of increasingly complicated calculations to put their companies on the most effective digital transformation paths. That means the relationship between the finance and IT teams need to be closer than ever — and that the CFO and CIO need to be having discussions structured around strategy first, budget second, Rimini Street finance chief Michael Perica said.

In speaking with the CIO, “I don't want to hear [about] cost initially in the conversation,” Perica said in an interview together with Rimini Street CIO Joe Locandro. “If this is the best technology or path, irrespective of cost, we should be pursuing it.”

Putting value before cost

The need for a tighter relationship between finance and IT has come under a spotlight in recent years, as finance chiefs take on more tech-related responsibilities and as tools such as automation and AI become more deeply integrated into businesses’ everyday processes, CFO Dive has previously reported.

The two departments can be a “powerful combination,” Locandro said, because they can leverage both financial and technology discipline across the whole organization — as the finance and IT teams are “cross functional in a company, we see things enterprise wide,” he said.

Investing in the relationship with their IT counterpart is crucial for finance leaders today, especially for businesses to be able to meet their strategic goals, Perica said. Most of his conversations with Locandro focus on “corporate strategy and how we're going to deploy our IT resources and capabilities, not only internally, but externally, for the enterprise wide goals” of the business, Perica said.

Perica has served as CFO for the Las Vegas-based provider of ERP support solutions since October 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. His previous roles include serving as vice president of finance, CFO energy systems global for EnerSys, and a five-year span at Alpha Technologies in various roles including a three-year stint as CFO.

Locandro, meanwhile, joined Rimini Street in February to lead the business’s global IT strategy and help drive “technology innovation initiatives in support of Rimini Street’s continued growth and client success,” according to a press release at the time. His experience includes a 25-year career in numerous CIO and IT roles, including serving as CIO for building materials provider Fletcher Building, a tenure as chief digital and business transformation officer for the Australian Energy Market Operator, and VP of business technology services for the Emirates group, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Before CIOs and CFOs can have a successful conversation about strategy, they need to find common ground. For both Perica and Locandro, it’s important that the CIO and CFO are peers inside of the executive leadership team, they said, and that each leader approaches the other with an eye toward value.

For instance, in working with IT leaders as a finance executive, a point of frustration for Perica is “is when they come to put in technology for technology’s sake,” he said. Rather, the focus should be on aligning “the technology and the deployment to business objectives,” he said.

On the IT side, meanwhile, “CFOs often treat IT as a cost, not as a potential advantage,” Locandro said. When CIOs report to CFOs, traditionally, IT is viewed as a cost center and not as a necessity for the running of the business or a value add, he said. However, “when you have a CIO and a CFO as peers on the executive committee, they look at things strategically, and they look at value creation, not cost minimization,” he said.

A birds-eye tech approach  

Technology budgets can be a key area where CIOs and CFOs differ: in a March survey by Big Four firm KPMG, almost one-third of finance chiefs said technology innovation spending is excessive, while just 16% of CIOs said the same, CFO Dive sister publication CIO Dive reported. Meanwhile, 12% of CFOs said tech budgets were “currently insufficient,” while one in three CIOs said the same.

One way to bridge that gap is by utilizing the natural birds-eye view both IT and finance have to look at technology implementations holistically. In conversations between Locandro and himself on the topic, the two discuss “how we're going to make IT investments enterprise wide, not just for my group, not just for any particular function within an organization,” Perica said. “And that's where I think it's…going to be a colossal miss if folks are not taking that view.”

When it comes to artificial intelligence initiatives, for example, “folks are going too fast and they're not taking an enterprise-wide look,” Perica said. Many companies have overshot their cost estimates on the technology, according to a recent study by Mavrik, an AI cost management solutions provider. The survey found 80% of enterprises missed AI infrastructure forecasts by over 25% while businesses also identified areas of “hidden costs,” such as data platforms and network access expenses.

The missed forecasts represent a familiar hiccup when it comes to technology implementations, Locandro said, where companies will jump on a technology hype cycle, “and they do a lot of proof of concepts, and then after doing a few they realize they have to put in governance,” Locandro said. “So often, governance is an afterthought versus a prerequisite.”

Without approaching such implementations with that eye toward governance, “you end up reworking it, and then you end up spending more money,” he said. “And then you go, ‘Well, if I had known this at the start, I would have probably sized it [differently] and put a different budget in place.’”

The evolution of the CFO’s role has continued throughout the year as businesses confront ongoing change, with finance chiefs, more and more often being asked to take on operational responsibilities. Doing so successfully, however, “requires a bit of a mindset shift” — both from the CFO and from their fellow executives, said Jason Godley, CFO of AI-powered revenue intelligence platform Xactly.

“Step one is, my mindset has to shift, and step two is, the [mindset of] people with whom I work with has to shift,” Godley told CFO Dive in an interview. “‘Oh, Jason's not the gatekeeper,’” he said of the change in perspective which needs to take place. “‘He will be at some point, because we need that, but at the end of the day he’s here to help us, guide us, coach us.’”

Melding the finance, operations mindset

Since February of 2023, Godley has served as finance chief for Denver-based Xactly, a Vista Equity portfolio company, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to Xactly, he served in a variety of roles for logistics and transportation firm Booster, including a period as president and a one-year stint in the combined role of chief operating officer and CFO.

At Xactly, COO is not a part of his title and his operational responsibilities at the company are informal, Godley said. Whether or not the title is formalized at a business, in Godley’s view, largely depends on what leadership thinks will be most effective for the culture of the company, he said. Software platform Salesforce, for example, recently tapped an executive in dual role of CFO and COO.

Regardless of title, however, there’s a growing expectation for finance chiefs, “in addition to the day job, the functional role of CFO, and CFO being a strategic advisor to the CEO, to also move into supporting, directly or indirectly, the operations of the business,” he said. That’s only been accelerated in an age where businesses are tasked with crafting a clear long-term growth strategy in an age of rapid change and complexity.

Part of the reason CFOs are being tapped to take on operations is because they already have a bird’s eye view of the business. The CFO “traditionally, is seeing all the activities that a company does,” Godley said. “Every function…is ultimately reflected in the financial statements.”

However, to be effective in an operational capacity, CFOs also need to be sure they can step out of the finance box, he said.

“You kind of take off your CFO hat, boom, and then can establish a variety of things to support the CEO, who's busy doing a bunch of stuff to help ensure that the plan that we put in place for the year is being executed,” he said. “So while I'm not responsible directly for the plan, I can put in place mechanisms which we can talk about that help run the business.”

An ‘unhealthy degree of curiosity’

For some, taking off the finance hat may not come easily — how different steps will ultimately impact financial outcomes is always going to be in the back of one’s mind as CFO, Godley said. Sharpening the ability to peer outside finance, and the skillsets one needs to serve as an effective operations leader, starts with “an almost unhealthy degree of curiosity about everything going on,” as well as a high dose of humility, he advised.  

When it comes to working with other leaders to set and drive strategy, for example, CFOs should be “hyper-curious about their function, try and learn what matters to them,” he said.

“Just be very open minded about what it is like to be in the lived experience of one of these functions and come to the table offering ideas, ways of thinking that have nothing to do with finance,” Godley said.

Such leaders should also be on the lookout for opportunities in other functions over the course of their career, he said. Godley, for instance, has been “fortunate to be in situations where, ‘hey, the sales leader is gone for nine months, run sales,’” he said. “Or, can you run operations for 12 months? 24 months?”

“Not only do you learn the tactical and practical [applications] of what they do, but I would say, more importantly, you become more empathetic to the problems that they face that you previously did not understand,” he said.