The Role of Australian CFOs in Redefining the Future of Finance

In this article:

• Building a Strong Data Foundation
• Addressing the Digital Skills Gap
• Governing a Digital Workforce
• Standing at the Centre of the AI Evolution

The 'future of finance' has been touted as a utopia where finance professionals are relieved of the manual drudgery of accounting tasks. A future where insights are surfaced in real time, data is seamlessly integrated across the tech stack, and finance leaders can model future performance with bullseye precision.

Thanks to developments in next generation ERPs and agentic AI, that future is a possibility today. But CFOs are grappling with a new challenge: how to move beyond incremental efficiency gains and business process automation (which are now table stakes), to fully realising this 'future' state.

It's not as easy as it sounds. There's more data, regulatory pressure, investor scrutiny and macro-economic volatility than ever before. Not to mention the heavy responsibilities of core finance tasks — from delivering accurate reporting, and guiding growth and profitability, to partnering on strategy execution.

So, how can CFOs find a balance between the core finance responsibilities of the past, and the AI-powered possibilities of the future?

Building a Strong Data Foundation 

It all starts with data. Research shows the lack of trusted, well governed information is one of the key factors slowing down the deployment and effectiveness of AI initiatives, with 77% of Australian CFOs still not seeing tangible value from their AI investments.

The good news is that CFOs don't need to continue the old ways of scheduling once-a-week or once-a-month static batch transfers between systems.

With zero-copy access to core financial data within the platforms you already use, your team can access a single source of truth in real time — avoiding data latency, version control issues and downstream security implications.

Good interoperability of finance systems is also important, offering you a single data pipeline and 'line of sight' drilldowns, from dashboards right down to source-level transactions.

Simon Adams, CFO & Chief Strategy Officer at Nando's ANZ, spoke about the importance of real-time data at our recent Finance Think Tank event in Sydney: "Hospitality is a 24/7 business," he said. "It seldom sleeps, so data becomes outdated incredibly quickly." 

"Not only that, but you've got a competitive environment. If you're looking at older data or not staying on top of what's happening on the ground across the country, you might be operating off a false premise when it comes to making key decisions."

No single software vendor can (or should) do it all, but partnering with your CIO to consolidate and streamline the number of systems used across your finance function can dramatically improve data hygiene, and give you a strong foundation for future innovation.

Addressing the Digital Skills Gap

Preparing for the future also means shifting your thinking from the type of work finance teams have always done, to the type of work you need them to do moving forward, and the skills they'll need to do it.

Simon Adams identified this as a challenge before implementing Workday. "We spent so much time closing the books, but when it came to commentary, we weren't adding any insight. And the result was, so what? We told them the variance, but we weren't telling the whole story."

Of course, this is easier said than done. According to AWS research, 39% of Australian businesses say they are held back by the digital skills gap, which is preventing them from adopting or expanding their use of AI.

AI and digital skills should be a key requirement of roles across the finance organisation, not just added in as an afterthought or a 'nice to have'.

It's not just about helping teams adapt to new technologies. Nurturing a skills-based culture also encourages and rewards intellectual curiosity, which is critical for the finance profession. We need people who can ask deep questions of the data, probe the results, iterate on AI outputs, and challenge assumptions.

Thinking strategically will become the ultimate differentiator for finance professionals – both for an individual's career trajectory and a company's bottom line. Ask yourself this: how many accounting job postings on your careers website include AI and digital skills? Is AI a focus for the talent you're trying to attract?

Governing a Digital Workforce

While most companies have experimented with generative AI for note taking, conference call summaries and drafting emails, the real game-changer for CFOs is agentic AI.

AI agents are digital employees that can act autonomously, without waiting for instructions. Once they have been given a goal, they identify the best way to achieve that goal, and initiate the relevant tasks involved.

However, this digital workforce requires rigorous governance to preserve your finance controls. It's important that AI agents operate within the confines of your audit, compliance and security policies – with a human in the loop at critical points in the workflow.

This means they need to live in your business context, embedded in functional areas and tied to tangible business outcomes. Without this, you risk 'agent slop' — where agents operate in silos, making mistakes, and worse, not even knowing they’ve made one. As a CFO, you should consider:

• Credentials and Security: Manage AI agents in the same place and in the same way that you manage human employees. After all, they require access, security, and an audit trail of activity and performance. They are onboarded, upskilled and, on occasions, offboarded.
• Orchestration: Individual agents operating in isolation deliver limited value. Instead, manage how your agents collaborate, and orchestrate their activities at an outcomes level, rather than discrete, siloed tasks.
• Explainability: If an agent tells you a vendor contract is expiring, you need to know why and how it arrived at that conclusion. Agents must be able to explain their reasoning and point to the source of their information. This is crucial for trust, auditability, and preventing hallucinations.

If your team is spending too much time on routine, cyclical tasks, delegating these to an AI agent is a good starting point. But it's critical to have the right governance processes in place to make sure agents are making your work better, without risking compliance.

Standing at the Centre of the AI Evolution

As Simon Adams pointed out, “We're a function that sees everything in the organisation." This enterprise-wide vantage point places CFOs in the best position to steer your company’s AI adoption, maturity evolution and value realisation.

For Simon Adams, this visibility gives him an opportunity to re-establish his team's value as a business partner — helping them work with stakeholders in the business to understand how decisions are made, not just reporting on the historical outcome. In his words: "If it's not value to the stakeholder, it's not value."

His final message was this: "Make the time (for AI). Carve out the time – an hour or two a day – and think about how this is going to impact your team."

By building a strong data foundation, addressing the digital skills gap and establishing strong governance processes, you'll understand how to deliver AI value to your stakeholders, and be in a position to lead a progressive, resilient and insight-driven finance function well into the future.