Finance leaders: more strategic, or less relevant?
Most CFOs have never actually done the job they were hired for.
You bring in a CFO when money flow gets complicated enough that someone needs to manage it properly. Their job is getting the business paid and managing strategic liquidity. But the reality of the role often looks nothing like that.
A CFO often walks into an enterprise and inherits a team of 50 in finance ops, coordinating with vendors, chasing approvals, and matching invoices that should have been resolved days ago. Most of their bandwidth goes to operational noise and reconciliation.
AI is going to remove a lot of that chaos. And when it does, the CFO’s job becomes (finally) more strategic. A CFO sees the entire financial picture across the business — that is what makes the role unique. But when most of the team’s time goes to chasing approvals, you only ever get to first-order thinking. Keep the lights on. Hit the numbers. Move to the next fire.
Remove the operational noise and there is room for second-, third-, and fourth-order thinking. What does offering early payment to a key supplier actually earn us? What does holding cash for 10 more days cost downstream? Where should capital move next quarter to drive growth, not just cover obligations?