Finance Leaders Traded Strategy for Manual Labor

The survey of 116 senior finance executives reveals that half of respondents view the talent and skills gap as the primary threat to their function’s stability. This concern ranks twice as high as regulatory shifts and significantly outpaces fears regarding cybersecurity or AI-driven fraud. For many organizations, the reality of this gap manifests as "human middleware," where controllers and directors perform manual interventions to bridge disconnected systems.

Despite aggressive plans to increase AI spending, execution remains stalled. While 53% of firms intend to prioritize AI investments over the next two years, only 3% have integrated the technology into their core strategy. Furthermore, 39% of these organizations deploy AI tools without any formal framework to measure impact, leaving them unable to determine if their investments yield results. Andrej Suskavcevic, CEO of Financial Executives International, noted that the constraint on finance has shifted from capital to capability, as the very people needed to optimize systems are currently occupied with holding them together manually. With only 10% of firms investing aggressively in upskilling, the report warns that transformation will remain elusive until leaders quantify and reclaim the time currently lost to reactive, manual work.