Opinion
The new CFO: From reporting the past to shaping the future
"AI offers finance teams a major opportunity to improve business performance," writes Noam Canetti, co-CEO at EY Israel. "The starting point should be the value they can create, not simply the hours they can save."
AI is opening up new possibilities for the CFO role and for expanding the finance function’s influence on the business. Realizing this opportunity calls for new priorities in training and professional development for finance leaders and their teams, building on existing expertise and experience. Technology enables organizations to connect information across fragmented systems, identify trends, risks and opportunities as they emerge, update forecasts and reports, and take immediate action. Helping steer the company in real time depends on people who can design processes, exercise judgment and lead change.
Finance functions have evolved through four technological generations. In the first, most effort went into assembling information for reporting, through manual work and separate systems. In the second, ERP systems brought transactions and processes together into a unified system of record, allowing greater focus on accuracy and control.
In the third generation, the shift to the cloud made it easier to adopt specialized SaaS systems for finance, sales and HR. The data accumulated in these systems, alongside data warehouses and BI tools, enabled managers to track performance and manage the business using KPIs and shifted the emphasis toward generating insights and explaining performance. Storytelling became increasingly important: turning financial data into a business narrative, articulating the company’s equity story to investors and explaining business performance to management. Yet bringing fragmented information together still required considerable work.
The fourth generation is now emerging, powered by AI and autonomous agents: systems that connect information, recommend responses and begin to execute. For example, early signs that sales are falling short of forecasts and budget targets could point to weaker demand, delivery delays or a shortage of salespeople. AI can identify the gap, examine possible causes and suggest a response before the quarter ends.
Acting on a recommendation requires confidence in the information and analysis behind it. In financial reporting, “close enough” is not good enough: an AI system may alter a number, claim a reconciliation is complete despite a discrepancy, or offer a misleading interpretation of accurate figures, all in an output that looks professional and convincing. Processes must therefore incorporate verification against source data, independent checks of reconciliations, segregation of duties and documentation that supports traceability, learning and correction. Human approval must be based on review and must not become a rubber stamp.
Designing and building business processes will become an increasingly important part of the CFO’s role. Alongside financial and business understanding, this requires an organization-wide perspective: how information, decisions and tasks move between functions, where delays arise and what influences results. It takes the imagination to see new possibilities, the ability to integrate appropriate systems and the leadership skills to bring people on board and drive change. Managing people and AI agents together will require understanding their capabilities and limitations and allocating tasks and authority. Judgment and accountability for decisions and outcomes will remain central to the role.
Access to professional knowledge and organizational information, together with automation of tasks such as reconciling accounts and building complex financial models, reduces the need for some traditional technical skills and creates room for new ones. Finance teams will increasingly bring together finance specialists and professionals with backgrounds in technology or industrial engineering and management. In roles as builders and architects, these professionals will work as internal forward-deployed engineers, partnering with business teams to understand their needs and build processes and technology solutions that improve finance operations and strengthen the function’s contribution to the business.
University education and ongoing professional development will need to evolve alongside these changes. Designing financial reporting processes and implementing SOX controls have already strengthened process thinking within the accounting profession, largely through work at accounting firms. That perspective must now extend to processes across the organization and to managing people and AI agents, starting in university accounting, economics and management programs. Israel has a deep pool of finance and leadership talent. Investing in these capabilities can enable these professionals to have a greater impact and strengthen Israel as a base for managing global companies.
AI offers finance teams a major opportunity to improve business performance. The starting point should be the value they can create, not simply the hours they can save. Now is the time to identify a business opportunity, build the processes and capabilities to pursue it, and get started.
Noam Canetti is co-CEO at EY Israel.
