Finance Resists Change
for a Reason
Calling a finance team change resistant explains nothing. The accountability the job carries explains most of it, and it points at a different way to introduce the tool.
- McKinsey's long running finding is that around 70% of transformation programs fail to achieve and sustain their objectives, and the causes are people rather than technology.
- Caitlin Haberberger describes the finance version as control rather than stubbornness. The person who carries the accountability wants to hold the process.
- Paul Barnhurst's Power Query point is the useful reality check. A genuinely powerful tool has sat in Excel for fifteen years with a fraction of finance using it.
- What moves a team is a small win inside the work they already own, not a program announcement about reimagining the function.
Finance teams get described as change resistant so routinely that the phrase has stopped carrying information. It is worth asking what the resistance is actually protecting, because the answer changes how you would introduce anything.
Some people, instead of seeing possibility, come from a place of fear. I am going to be responsible, so I need to control it.
Caitlin Haberberger, Agent CFO PodcastThat is not irrational. The controller who signs the accounts carries personal accountability for a number produced by a process they did not design and cannot inspect. Wanting to hold the process is a reasonable response to being the one who answers for it.
The odds are bad everywhere, not just in finance
McKinsey's research, repeated over more than a decade, puts around 70% of transformation programs short of their stated objectives, with fewer than a third improving performance and sustaining the improvement. The failure modes they list are sponsorship, communication, capability and resistance rather than technology.
The 2025 FP&A Trends Survey adds the finance specific version. Two percent of planning teams describe themselves as fully optimized. The gap between what the tooling can do and what teams actually run is not new and is not about the tooling.
Power Query is one of the most powerful tools ever built in Excel. Ten percent of people use it, and it has been around fifteen years. So am I convinced we are all going to figure out AI in a couple of years? I am not.
Paul Barnhurst, The FP&A Guy
Invisible when it works, career defining when it does not
The reward structure in accounting is asymmetric in a way that few other functions match, and Caitlin Haberberger named it plainly.
If an accounting team is doing a great job, you might never know it, because it means things were functioning smoothly.
Caitlin HaberbergerThere is no upside to a flawless close and a substantial downside to a restatement. Under that payoff, caution about a new tool in the ledger path is the correct read of the incentives, not a personality flaw. Any rollout that treats it as a flaw will lose the argument.
The phrase to listen for
Dave Sackett, a finance leader who has been arguing for AI in the function since well before it was fashionable, offers the tell.
The most dangerous phrase in finance is: we have always done it this way.
Dave Sackett, Agent CFO PodcastIt is dangerous because it is usually true and rarely a reason. The process does work, which is how it survived, and that says nothing about whether it should still exist. Caitlin Haberberger put the corrective as a question of scope.
A misconception is that we are trying to improve workflows as they look today. The people who win are willing to radically reimagine the roles, and look at the body of work that needs to get done, not how it is getting done today.
Caitlin HaberbergerThe tension between those two is real. Reimagining the function is the right long term frame and a terrible opening move, because it asks a cautious team to accept a large unfamiliar risk before they have any evidence.
Ashok Manthena, Chief Finance AI at ChatFin
Change is very difficult with finance teams. I still cannot find the root cause of it.
Breaking it is not about individual motivation or intelligence. It is breaking into the process of the work itself.
We asked the leaders after a few months how things were working. They had totally forgotten about the product, because it was working so well.
A rollout built for a cautious team
The sequence matters more than the pitch. Each step earns the right to the next one.
Pick a task with a visible answer
Something the team can check in ten minutes against a number they already know. Bank reconciliation against a closed month beats a forecast nobody can verify.
Run it in parallel for one cycle
The agent drafts, the person does it the old way, and you compare. This costs one cycle and buys the only evidence that actually persuades an accountant.
Give the team the corrections
When the output is wrong, the person who caught it should be the one who changes the rule. Ownership of the fix is what converts a skeptic.
Say nothing about transformation
Announce a reconciliation that now drafts itself. The wider reimagining is a conclusion the team reaches later, from evidence, and it does not survive being asserted first.
What adoption looks like when it worked
Watch for people to stop mentioning it. A tool that has been absorbed into the work does not get discussed, because there is nothing left to discuss.
That is a slower story than a transformation program and it holds, which is the part McKinsey finds most programs miss. Sustaining the change is a separate problem from making it, and it is won by the team owning the process rather than receiving it. Teams that get there tend to be the ones where people trust the output because they can check it.
Power Query is one of the most powerful tools ever built in Excel. Ten percent of people use it, and it has been around fifteen years.
Paul Barnhurst, The FP&A GuyNothing posts until somebody on your team signs it.
ChatFin drafts. Your team approves. Every drafted entry, match and reconciliation carries the source document, the rule applied and the reasoning, so the person signing can disagree with a specific step rather than take the answer on trust.
That is a control requirement and it is also the only rollout that works with a team who carries personal accountability for the number. Start with one recoverable workflow, run it in parallel for a cycle, and expand when the team asks for it. See the integration coverage to check your stack.
The veto stays with your controller. That is what makes the first project possible.
Book a demo- Perspectives on transformation, McKinsey & Company, on the share of transformation programs that fail to achieve and sustain their stated objectives.
- 2025 FP&A Trends Survey benchmarks, FP&A Trends Group, on how planning teams split their time and rate their own data quality.
- Quotes are from episodes of the Agent CFO Podcast, hosted by Ashok Manthena, lightly edited from the transcripts for readability.
See what this looks like on your own finance data.
Bring one workflow, a close task, a reconciliation or a cash application queue, and we will run it on your own data. You will see the drafted output, the source behind it, and the review gate your team would sit in.