Life comes at you fast. And so does business. Are your tools keeping up?

(Spoiler: probably not)

Hiring plans, product launches, and growth forecasts shouldn’t take days to update. By the time you have an answer, the question has already changed. That means meetings stall. Opportunities pass. And your team gets stuck waiting instead of acting.

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Your business doesn’t wait. Your finance tools shouldn’t either.

See Runway in action

Trust issues

I’d been pulling 80-hour weeks for months.

New turnaround CFO gigs can be like that: broken processes, failing teams, and a business nose-diving into the ground.

You grab the controls yourself and hope you can pull up in time.

But months in, I wasn’t seeing any light at the end of the tunnel. If anything, it felt darker. My team’s monthly accounts, earnings releases, board papers, and even financial models, were riddled with careless errors.

And for every mistake I caught, I suspected ten more slipped through.

It p*ssed me off.

Not because I’m a diva unprepared to get my hands dirty. But because this was a huge company with a 200-person finance function, VPs of Finance, and BU CFOs making real money to do these jobs right.

Instead, I was stuck double-checking basic numbers, killing my velocity and sucking up time I should have been spending on strategic decisions and making an impact in the business, the reason a CFO exists.

I set myself a benchmark: how could I 10X the level of impact I personally had on the business… and work 20-25 hours less per week?

That meant becoming less tolerant of basic mistakes. If I had to second-guess my team’s every output, I’d never steer this company out of a cash tailspin.

So I accelerated some planned leadership changes. Yes, more short-term pain, but I needed the right people in the right jobs, and now.

As we fixed root processes and reporting, I started trusting more of what landed on my desk.

Sure, I still reviewed everything, but I wasn’t finding unforgivable mistakes anymore. My confidence in the team and the data rose fast.

And with that?

My velocity of decisions and actions in the business rose quickly.

It would be a long road, but I was on the right path.

With Runway, financial planning is instant. Drag and drop plans to adjust timelines, compare scenarios in seconds, and see the impact across your entire business—without any lag, broken formulas, or version control chaos.

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The 2035 CFO

This is the third part of a four-part series, diving deep into what the future of the CFO role looks like.

In week 1, we debunked the LinkedIn guru nonsense about the ‘changing role of the CFO’ and got to the bottom of what exactly is changing, and what is not.

Last week, we broke down the short and long-term impact of AI on the finance function, bit by bit.

So now we have a sense of where the finance function is headed. Which means we can get more precise about what this means for the CFO and their role in it.

Let’s start from first principles.

The CFO Role

The CFO has two atomic duties: value creation and asset protection. Equally important (although not equally fashionable), the CFOs job is to balance them to create asymmetric upsides. A capped floor (asset protection) and uncapped upside (value creation).

I think these atomic duties will be unchanged in 5, 10, or even 50 years.

This is why we exist. Just like pilots exist to move people from A to B safely, and doctors exist to heal sick people.

Of course, “value creation” and “asset protection” don’t exactly work on a job description.

Behind those atomic duties are more specific responsibilities: strategic decision-making, driving performance, financial controlling, capital management, stakeholder management, and risk management.

And - as we said in week 1 - the CFO role itself will change less than any other in the finance.

But while the core role won’t change that much, CFOs will still need to evolve. Adapt or die (or, at least, adapt or lose your job).

Here are seven ways CFOs must grow over the next decade:

7 Ways the CFO Needs to Adapt

1. Maximize personal AND team impact

2. Focus on the unautomatable

3. Prepare to be the last generalist standing

4. Externalize finance thinking

5. Master non-finance data

6. Be a personality

7. Double down on the basics

Let’s take each in turn.

1) Maximize personal AND team impact

A CFO’s performance should be judged on three dimensions:

1. The performance of the business

2. The output of the team, processes, and systems they are responsible for (as a whole)

3. The significance of their personal impact

The CFO has significant influence over 1, but not control. So let’s talk about 2 & 3 (where the CFO has both influence & control).

A CFO who is personally productive but has a weak function underneath them is just a high-functioning bottleneck. If everything runs through you, you’re not leading, you’re micromanaging. This was me in the opening anecdote.

A CFO who has a strong function, but low personal impact, is just a glorified mailbox. Receiving tasks, delegating them, collecting responses, passing them across or upwards. Plenty of CFO careers have been built this way, but that era is ending. The ability to shuffle work around will no longer be a respected skill. Businesses will just promote one of the people doing the real work and take the cost saving.

The CFO of the future needs extreme leverage: a finance function that runs like a machine, paired with high-velocity decision-making and real strategic impact from the CFO themselves. No passengers.

And if a CFO has no personal impact and a weak function? Well, we don’t need to waste time talking about those.

2) Focus on the unautomatable

As we discussed last week, there are three tasks AI can’t, or won’t be allowed to, replace:

1. High-stakes decisions

2. Personal relationships

3. Accountability

It follows, then, that the CFO of the future must spend 100% of their time operating in these three zones.

And if I had to pick one of the three skill; it would be building relationships.

Even decision making skills and accountability / ownership could become more commoditized eventually. But the quality of your internal and external relationships will forever be unique to you.

And remember… the definition of a good relationship is one where you have so much credit in the bank with your key stakeholders, that you can ask for something highly unreasonable … and get it. That is the test.

Think of building your network as a career long journey, slowly compounding over time. One day, any problem or question you have will never be more than one short phone call away.

3) Prepare to be the last generalist standing

As we said in Week 1 of this series, the core CFO role won’t change much, but the finance function beneath them will be upended.

AI is going to automate much of the work traditionally done by finance generalists, such as reporting accountants, FP&A analysts, and others. What remains will be more highly leveraged specialist roles.

And those roles will lean even harder into their specialisms. The finance team will look more like a lean elite special forces unit made up of people like automation-specialist controllers, PhD-level data scientists, and M&A pros with a decade of investment banking experience.

People that have dedicated their career to a very specific sub-discipline of finance

In this world the CFO will be “the last generalist standing.”

However, managing specialists is very different from managing generalists. It’s harder to have credibility and impact when your team knows so more than you in their respective domains.

I’ve felt this firsthand in the past when managing tax pros.

Now imagine that same dynamic but with a team full of hyper-specialists. As CFO, your technical credibility (whatever finance discipline you are from) won’t count for as much.

Instead, the CFO’s job will be to connect the dots and make magic happen in the spaces between them (and the business). This has always been true.

But soon, it’ll be even more important.

4) Externalizing finance thinking

It’s not often I hear something that alters my frame of what finance should be.

But that happened a month ago when I met Siqi Chen.

We were talking about how the best CFOs (and CEOs) can make great ‘gut feel’ decisions because of their intuition for the numbers. And the power this has to bring speed and execution velocity to a business: “Let’s go ahead. We should run the numbers properly, but do it quickly, I’m 99% sure it will say this, and I don’t want to hold things up. If I’m wrong, we can put the brakes on.”

We talked about this and we agreed that this wasn’t gut feel, or intuition. It was a deep familiarity with the business/financial model and a ton of practice using it. It was an internalization of the model.

Then he dropped the bomb:

“The next frontier for finance is to work out how to externalize that same depth of thinking. Share it with the rest of the business.”

That is an interesting thought. I’m sure you’ve had a moment where you wished the business understood the economics of the business a little more intuitively. I have them frequently.

But what if the whole business could ‘think’ like a CFO? Aided by the rigor of an AI-powered financial model. As FP&A tools improve, this is not fantasy. It’s real.

But this is a big change for finance and the business. A culture change.

Finance is brilliant at building tools for working in a silo. We are not so good at building tools for collaborative thinking. I believe this will be table stakes in the future. There is a steep learning curve and a lot of culture change for us ahead.

CFOs that can enable this within the business will unlock extraordinary value, giving the business the power to make better decisions every day at scale.

5) Master non-financial data

A data war is about to start… if it hasn’t already.

For decades, finance was the default owner of business data.

The 1990s and 2000s were about cramming everything into ERP systems. Mostly financial and operational data, with finance naturally at the center.

Then came the SaaS explosion.

Over the last 15 years, business data has been unbundled across specialized platforms. Marketing, product, and customer teams now sit on mountains of their own data. Especially in internet-based businesses tracking real-time usage and analytics.

Now, the pendulum is swinging back. Businesses need a single source of truth, a master data hub that unifies financial and non-financial metrics.

Who should own it?

The LinkedIn ‘CFO’ gurus will tell you finance is the obvious choice. And they could be right. Finance has a head start on the governance, controls, and discipline needed to ensure data integrity.

But there’s another possible outcome.

One where we see the finance function becomes unbundled.

Where data science becomes so critical that it’s pulled into a separate function. In that world, finance might not become “more strategic” at all.

Instead, it could be stripped back to a narrower, purely accounting / financial management role. There’s a world where data management becomes a universally adopted major business function itself. With a Chief Data Officer or Chief Analytics Officer - sat at the board room table - owning the real insight and decision-making power.

Or maybe that role sits under the IT function. You think CIOs are going to give data up without a fight?

This isn’t just theory, it’s already happening in some places. Look at ESG reporting. Some businesses have placed it under finance. But others have built dedicated carbon accounting teams outside of finance, ensuring ESG data gets the same level of attention as financial reporting.

The lesson?

Finance doesn’t have an automatic right to ‘own data.’ It has to earn it.

That means CFOs must lean hard into non-financial metrics ensuring they receive the same governance, rigor, and resources as financial reporting. Too many finance teams volunteer to own non-financial reporting but fail to invest in it properly. If we want to own data, we must prove finance is the best place for it.

This will need to be a CFO-led agenda. It isn’t just about capability there will be internal politics at play.

But CFOs who lean hardest into non-financial metrics, and building capable data analytic functions, have the best chance of winning that battle.

6) Be a personality

There is a long-held stereotype that CFOs lack charisma (or ‘the rizz’ as my children tell me it’s now called.)

And I think that stereotype generally seems to be correct. I can think of friends and former colleagues who are charismatic and interesting people when you get to know them privately. But their ‘work face?’ Brow-beaten bookkeepers…

Now, I’m not saying bring your ‘whole self to work’ (I’m throwing up a bit just thinking about those words).

Being likable, open, generous, and engaging is the best way to build relationships. There’s no magic formula. People like likable people.

And when people like you, it’s a foundation to build a relationship on. And the more you give, the more you’ll be able to ask for (when you need it).

Top CFOs are increasingly becoming mini-business celebrities, too. Today CFOs of the world’s top companies will feature in business media in ways they did not twenty years ago.

That’s mostly thanks to social media. You certainly don’t need to become an influencer, but what’s clear is that having an appealing ‘public face’ is becoming more important for CFOs.

It helps with attracting top talent too.

7) Double down on the basics

I don't worry about CFOs of the future having the data analytics skills, or technical skills they need to succeed in the future.

The CFOs of tomorrow will be working with advanced data analytics as standard soon. If they aren’t already. The winds of progress will blow them in that direction.

It's the shiny new thing.

I worry about where they will get the fundamental (but increasingly unfashionable) skills from: controllership, stakeholder management, and decision-making.

I particularly worry about controllership. The CFO is the controller-in-chief of a business. If there is an accounting irregularity, the CFO gets famous fast. Not the controller.

I’ve said many times before that controllership skills are necessary, but not sufficient to be a CFO. Most of my career before CFO was in FP&A types roles, but my few years in the Big 4 and controller positions have been vital to me as a CFO.

The CFO of the future will not be able to blame ‘AI’ if something goes wrong. They will need to understand how their accounts are put together. And make judgments on material accounting issues.

There’ll be many CFOs over the next decade who lose their jobs (and maybe their reputations) when they lose control of their balance sheets as they upend their functions with technology.

When everyone else is talking about technology and genuine transformational change, it will be difficult to keep your teams focused on the basics. Your first duty, as CFO, is to make sure the numbers are right. With AI-induced chaos around you, never lose sight of that.

Net-net

The next generation of CFOs won’t just need to navigate this shift, they’ll need to survive it.

The rise of AI and automation doesn’t just change how finance functions operate, it changes how finance professionals grow into CFOs.

Where do the CFOs of the future come from when entire career paths (controllership, financial reporting, even traditional FP&A) will be gutted by AI?

Do future CFOs just get plucked from data science teams? Do they come from commercial finance and operations? Or do the automation guru controllers of the future become the natural successor?

The route to CFO is becoming far less linear, and anyone thinking about a finance leadership career needs to adjust their trajectory accordingly.

And if the CFO will remain a generalist role, but one managing specialists. Then how do the CFOs of tomorrow get to the seat at all? It feels contradictory.

I had a ton of replies to last week’s post worried about exactly this point. I think this is the most fascinating dynamic of this whole ‘future CFO’ debate. It’s the most difficult problem to solve.

And, I don’t know the answer. No-one does. But next week we will talk about what younger finance pros should do to best position themselves for the future CFO role.

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