2025 is well underway—but what will the defining trends be for CFOs? Read on to learn about the importance of upskilling finance teams, adopting cloud-based solutions, and AI as a key enabler of integrated finance.
The finance world saw major transformations in 2024, and nowhere is that more evident than in financial planning and analysis. With AI and big data at the helm, FP&A has gone from a traditional numbers-crunching function to a strategic enabler. Forward-thinking CFOs are injecting FP&A into every area of the business, rapidly upskilling their teams, and adopting new tools, pushing ahead of their competitors in the process.
The good news for those in the financial planning industry? Most of these trends are still in their early stages. No matter what stage of finance modernization your organization is at, 2025 presents exciting opportunities to elevate your FP&A value and impact.
With that in mind, we’ve assembled the most critical FP&A trends for CFOs and finance professionals in the coming year, the challenges you’ll need to navigate, and the tools required to position your team for success.
Key Takeaways
AI is transforming FP&A: AI is helping FP&A shift from a reactive function to a proactive, strategic enabler.
Upskilling is essential: CFOs must prioritize upskilling employees to leverage AI and advanced predictive analytics effectively.
Data quality drives success: Accurate, clean, and accessible data is foundational for AI-driven insights and informed decision-making.
Collaboration is key: Cross-departmental buy-in and FP&A integration into enterprise planning are critical for driving value organization-wide.
Cloud-based tools lead the way: True FP&A modernization relies on cloud platforms to handle data complexity, foster collaboration, and enable continuous planning.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are indisputably the most transformative technological advancements of the digital age—and FP&A is no exception. The overwhelming majority of CFOs view AI as critical for driving efficiency and business intelligence in the finance function. The Workday AI IQ survey found 99% of finance and other business leaders believe there are business benefits to adopting AI.
At the same time, three-quarters say they believe their organizations lack the skills to take full advantage of AI right now, and view it as an opportunity for growth, underscoring its emerging importance as we prepare for a new year.
This will fundamentally change the way finance departments and financial services operate. By handling tasks that once took days in seconds—data aggregation, scenario modeling, anomaly detection, and the like—FP&A teams’ focus will shift from generating data to serving as strategic partners.
Two primary initiatives will drive this new level of collaboration. First: wide-scale upskilling across finance departments. AI tools are only as powerful as the human employees who use them. For CFOs, this will mean making sure their employees are equipped with the AI skillsets they need to actively use AI in day-to-day work.
Second, generative AI will serve as a democratizer of financial insights across the organization. Natural language processing (NLP), for example, will allow employees to query data systems conversationally, lowering technical barriers for non-specialists and enabling broader, cross-departmental participation in building financial strategy.
As AI redefines FP&A operations, data mastery is becoming a growing imperative. AI depends on clean, reliable, well-structured data. CFOs should be leaders in driving data stewardship practices that guarantee AI insights are accurate and dependable. Collaboration in the C-suite will be critical to this end, especially for CFOs and CIOs.
Workday research uncovered that organizations with high CFO-CIO alignment are further along in their digital finance transformation than those without it. In the same report, Workday CFO Barbara Larson outlines why this is so crucial for CFOs in the future:
“CFOs today are required to provide more than just financial insights. They’re required to provide insights that can drive operational change and guide business strategy, and ultimately provide long-term value to stakeholders.”
Organizations with high CFO-CIO alignment are further along in their digital finance transformation than those without it.
As FP&A transitions from a historically reactive function to a proactive, strategic enabler, the emphasis on cross-departmental collaboration is intensifying. AI tools now allow FP&A teams to integrate financial insights into broader business strategy more effectively, fostering partnerships across the organization to drive value and support department-specific decisions:
Marketing: Ensuring marketing budgets are allocated to high-ROI campaigns by providing insights into customer acquisition costs and channel performance
Sales: Refining revenue forecasts, analyzing pipeline performance, and optimizing incentive structures for profitability
Product development: Evaluating the financial viability of new products or features, ensuring development efforts align with profitability goals
Supply chain and operations: Modeling procurement, inventory, and logistics scenarios to optimize costs and enhance operational efficiency
Human resources: Assessing the financial impact of hiring, retention, and compensation strategies, ensuring alignment with budget priorities
IT and technology: Evaluating the costs and ROI of technology investments, ensuring financial sustainability and strategic alignment
C-suite: Providing scenario-based forecasts and strategic insights to align departmental decisions with corporate objectives
In these decisions and more, FP&A teams will act as liaisons between finance and other departments, translating financial data into insights that drive action. This necessitates not only upskilling in technical proficiency—like using AI—but also strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills to align financial planning with organizational goals.
Strategic business partnerships will pave the path for more integrated financial planning in general—a practice that puts all financial budgeting, forecasting, and modeling in a single cohesive plan. It’s a trend that furthers the CFO as a true strategic leader (vs. a high-level numbers expert) and pushes FP&A teams to be an extension of the same.
Leaders in every department will see advantages from being more finance-informed, no doubt, but it’s a mutually beneficial practice—the Workday CFO Indicator Report found more than half of CFOs are increasingly relying on non-financial data to make important decisions.
With a holistic view of the enterprise, CFOs will be better-informed not only about what makes sense from a financial perspective, but about what aligns most with what other top company leaders prioritize in their own strategic visions.
The continuous alignment between fiscal responsibility and strategic goal-planning offered by integrated FP&A has potential to unlock new levels of leadership engagement and stakeholder approval.
None of the above will be possible without cloud-based financial management solutions—the gold standard for modern FP&A. Cloud technologies and their key capabilities, such as automating systems, streamlining financial close, and enabling continuous planning, were identified by CFOs as some of the top benefits of digital finance transformation.
Cloud-based tools are the key to handling large data volumes, creating integrated FP&A workflows, and driving the collaboration and finance data democratization companies need to make fast, accurate, data-driven decisions. They contain important features that make data digestible and meaningful across the enterprise:
Cloud systems are the ultimate enabler of all other key trends on our list for 2025—from implementing AI and advanced analytics, to collaborating effectively, to making financial data an asset that’s leveraged strategically in every part of the organization.
Driving FP&A transformation isn’t without challenges. Success for CFOs will depend on addressing skill gaps, improving data governance, and fostering alignment across the organization. Here are three challenges that CFOs must be mindful of in 2025—and beyond.
Recognizing that FP&A employees need upskilling is only the first step—training them effectively is where things can be challenging for CFOs without the right execution. Change management plays a key role in making it happen.
Workday research has identified a critical trust gap that exists right now between AI and the people expected to use it—only 52% of employees believe their companies will adopt AI in a responsible and trustworthy way.
The takeaway for CFOs: employees must be empowered and educated about new AI tools, rather than forced into adopting them. This means communicating the why behind new FP&A approaches, highlighting real value-adds and, emphasizing how AI will enhance rather than replace roles in the finance department.
Only 52% of employees currently believe their organizations will adopt AI in a trustworthy and responsible way.
The use of AI in FP&A hinges on accurate, structured, and accessible data—but fragmented systems and internal inconsistencies remain common obstacles. CFOs must work to establish robust data governance frameworks to organize, clean, and harmonize data.
Cooperation between CFOs and CIOs is crucial to maintaining reliable data, along with sound software tools that can manage data and automate FP&A processes at scale. Companies that fail on these counts risk creating a cycle of poor-quality data creating inaccurate results, which in turn leads to further poor-quality data.
Integrated FP&A requires cross-departmental collaboration, but as any leader knows, buy-in doesn’t happen overnight. Just as focused change management is needed to drive successful upskilling, CFOs must be ready to demonstrate the value-add for other members of the C-suite and their teams to take a more active, engaged role in financial planning.
Software tools help here again by making data accessible and collaboration easy, as well as delivering quick time-to-value—when leaders in other parts of the organization can see data translated into results for their part of the business, they’ll be quicker to get on board.
Putting members of the FP&A team on project teams across the organization can also be effective. By injecting an FP&A perspective into non-finance initiatives, stakeholders in other parts of the company can see its value firsthand.
In 2025, finance leaders have an exciting opportunity to lead the transformation of FP&A into a central part of enterprise strategy. CFOs will continue to deliver on financial goals, but the future of FP&A will see greater integration, cross-organization accountability, and strategic impact.
Meeting this potential comes down to a few key steps:
With these strategies top-of-mind, CFOs can position their teams to deliver sustained value, evolve with emerging FP&A trends, and shape the strategic direction of their organizations.
Workday empowers CFOs with FP&A tools designed to address today’s challenges and unlock tomorrow’s opportunities. Explore how Workday can help your team drive finance transformation.
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