Finance transformation will be incremental and cautious, not a big-bang disruption. AI adoption will happen step by step, quietly changing how work gets done rather than through a sudden overhaul. Finance teams are inherently cautious due to high accountability and audit requirements.

AI removes manual friction and accelerates learning, but hasn't yet been perfectly packaged for finance. While the potential is clear, finance teams are still waiting for AI solutions that are specifically designed for their workflows—tools that feel natural and trustworthy for accountants and FP&A professionals.

Finance leadership is broader than accounting and requires judgment, influence, and context. A VP of Finance isn't just managing numbers—they're connecting strategy with execution, translating financial data into business decisions, and building alignment across departments. It's a role that requires both technical expertise and exceptional people skills.

The VP of Finance is a cross-functional role that connects leadership, teams, and financial performance. They serve as the glue holding the organization together, communicating with everyone from the board to individual contributors. A great VP of Finance has empathy for the business, supports partners proactively, and flips the narrative from "finance says no" to "finance enables success."

Budgets created in isolation without strategy or alignment signal deeper organizational issues. When budgeting becomes a finance-only exercise, it means the business isn't engaged in the planning process. This disconnect leads to unrealistic targets, misaligned priorities, and a budget that becomes outdated almost immediately.

Annual budgets become outdated quickly without continuous planning and alignment. By February, the budget created in December is already obsolete. Instead of hyper-focusing on static budgets, finance teams should prioritize rolling forecasts, unit economics, margins, ROI metrics, and cash flow management—areas that provide real-time visibility into business performance.

Manual procure-to-pay and point-in-time processes should be automated end-to-end. The entire accounts payable process—from invoice receipt to approval to payment—is antiquated and wildly inefficient. Modern tools can automate vendor approvals, purchase orders, invoice scanning, ERP booking, and payments with AI learning in the background, reducing a multi-person job to a few hours per week.

Document processing and accounting memos will be transformed by AI-driven synthesis. AI can already read contracts, extract data from invoices and remittance advices, and even draft accounting memos by referencing US GAAP codification. The key is solving these small, time-consuming problems first, then layering up to bigger challenges rather than expecting AI to revolutionize everything at once.

Finance teams suffer from tool sprawl; expense, BI, and ETL point solutions will consolidate. Companies are buying external tools to sit on top of their ERPs because systems like NetSuite lack critical automation capabilities. This fragmentation creates integration headaches and inefficiencies. The future belongs to platforms that consolidate functionality and reduce the number of vendors finance teams need to manage.

High accountability, audits, and fear of failure make finance teams cautious. Unlike other departments, finance mistakes can have material consequences—restatements, audit findings, compliance violations. This creates a culture of conservatism where change is approached carefully. Leaders need to understand this context when introducing new tools or processes to finance teams.

They lead with empathy, presence, listening, and decisive clarity. The best finance leaders understand that people may not always want to hear what you have to say, especially when delivering bad news. Success comes from approaching individuals appropriately based on who they are, where they're at, and what their goals are—delivering tough messages in ways that build trust rather than defensiveness.

AI should automate repetitive work while humans handle alignment, judgment, and trade-offs. AI excels at baseline forecasts, document processing, and pattern recognition. But the human layer—understanding context, building consensus, making strategic trade-offs, and driving organizational change—remains critical. The goal isn't to replace finance professionals but to free them from manual work so they can focus on the parts of their job that truly require human insight.