A man and a woman are standing in front of a glass wall writing on sticky notes.
getty
For three years running, one item has sat at the top of CFOs’ to-do lists, ahead of cost-cutting, ahead of AI and ahead of talent. According to Gartner’s Evanta CFO community network, which surveys more than 100 finance chiefs annually on their functional priorities, “executing finance transformation” has held the No. 1 spot for a third consecutive year heading into 2026, with AI and automation in finance climbing to No. 2 from fourth place a year earlier.
That shift marks a notable change in emphasis. For most of the past decade, finance transformation was something CFOs pursued in response to a merger, an ERP upgrade or a change in ownership. In 2026, it looks more like a standing item on the agenda, renewed each year rather than checked off once and filed away.
Three separate surveys of finance leaders, conducted independently by Gartner, Deloitte and PwC over the past several months, point to the same conclusion from different angles: Finance is doing more with tighter resources in a more volatile environment, and leaders are redesigning the function as a result.
Taken together, the research suggests something more specific than “CFOs are busy.” It suggests the tools finance functions relied on for the past decade, incremental automation, point solutions bought department by department, annual planning cycles built for a calmer environment, no longer keep pace with what the business demands. That gap is driving CFOs toward structural change rather than another round of software purchases.
The Pressure Point Inside The CFO Role
Start with the tension at the center of the CFO’s job right now. Gartner’s 2026 CFO Agenda research, based on a survey of more than 200 finance chiefs fielded in August 2025, found that 56% rank enterprisewide cost optimization among their top five priorities for the year, while 47% simultaneously rank allocating capital to new growth opportunities in their top five. Dennis Gannon, a vice president analyst in Gartner’s finance practice, described the result as a “very explicit tension” between protecting margins and funding growth, one that shows up “every day” in his conversations with finance chiefs.
Layered on top of that tension is a question of confidence. The same Gartner research found that just 36% of CFOs feel assured they can drive meaningful enterprise impact from AI, even as investment in the technology continues to climb. That gap between spending and confidence arguably offers the clearest evidence that AI adoption in finance has outpaced the operating models, data foundations and skills needed to make it pay off. That mismatch is a large part of why transformation, rather than any single technology purchase, has become the priority framing for CFOs this year.
PwC’s Pulse Survey, which polls CFOs and other C-suite executives on a rolling basis, adds a talent dimension to the picture. In its most recent finance leader survey, 51% of CFOs cited talent retention and skills shortages as one of the top three barriers to delivering on their finance strategy, even as 58% said they were investing in AI and advanced analytics and 65% said they were actively adjusting financial forecasts and budgets in response to ongoing volatility. In other words, CFOs are modernizing the function with a workforce that, by their own admission, doesn’t yet have all the skills the modernization requires.
Digital Transformation Becomes The Top Priority
Deloitte’s CFO Signals survey, which polls roughly 200 finance chiefs at large North American companies each quarter, offers perhaps the starkest single data point in this year’s research: 50% of CFOs surveyed in the fourth quarter of 2025 named digital transformation of finance as their single top priority for 2026, ahead of cash management optimization and capital allocation. That’s a notable move up the list; enterprise risk management had occupied the top spot in earlier surveys.
The same survey found 87% of CFOs believe AI will be extremely or very important to how their finance department operates this year, and 54% named integrating AI agents into finance workflows as a top transformation priority, ahead of improving data quality, access and usability, which 52% cited. Steve Gallucci, who leads Deloitte’s CFO Program, told Fortune the shift reflects finance leaders moving “from exploration to execution” on technology, particularly AI, after a year largely spent testing use cases and building comfort with the tools.
Notably, Deloitte’s survey also found CFO confidence climbing to its highest level since late 2021, with nearly six in 10 respondents saying now is a good time to take on more risk, up sharply from roughly a third of respondents just one quarter earlier. Rising confidence, in other words, is translating into a greater willingness to commit to structural change rather than incremental fixes.
Why Transformation, Not Just Automation, Is Taking Hold
It’s worth pausing on why finance leaders and the analysts who study them are reaching for the word “transformation” rather than something narrower, like automation or digitization. Automating a process or deploying a chatbot inside the general ledger is, by most definitions, an improvement to an existing system. Transformation implies something closer to redesigning the system itself: how the finance function is organized, which activities it centralizes or outsources, how decisions get made and by whom, and what skills its people need to have.
That distinction matters because it explains why AI adoption alone hasn’t satisfied CFOs, even as investment in the technology accelerates. Gartner’s research on 2026 CFO budget priorities, based on a survey of more than 300 finance leaders, found nearly 60% plan to increase finance function AI investment by 10% or more this year, with efficiency and productivity cited by 88% of CFOs as a top-three priority. Yet the same body of Gartner research shows confidence in translating that investment into results running well behind the spending itself. Tools bolted onto an unchanged operating model tend to produce marginal gains. Tools embedded in a deliberately redesigned finance function are where CFOs now place their bets for a bigger payoff.
The Hard Questions That Come Next
None of this settles the harder, more practical questions that come next, and CFOs are now grappling with them in boardrooms and steering committees.
- Why do so many well-funded, well-sponsored transformation efforts still fail to deliver what leaders promised, and what separates the ones that succeed?
- What does a finance operating model actually look like once the redesign moves beyond an org chart, covering process, technology, governance and culture at the same time?
- How should CFOs decide which of dozens of possible initiatives, from shared services to AI agents to rolling forecasts, make the shortlist, and how do they prove those initiatives paid off once implemented?
- And because technology and structure are the easy parts by comparison, how do CFOs get their own people to work differently once the new systems and structures are in place, and how do they govern a multiyear change program without disrupting the monthly close in the meantime?
Those questions don’t have tidy, universal answers, which is precisely why “executing finance transformation” has topped the CFO agenda for three years in a row rather than being solved and moved past. Taken together, the data shows a finance function in the middle of a structural reset. CFOs aren’t treating transformation as a project anymore; they’re treating it as the operating posture required to navigate a decade defined by volatility, tighter resources and rising expectations. The priority isn’t about chasing the next tool. It’s about rebuilding finance so it can keep pace with the business it serves.