Sit in a sponsor business review and listen for five minutes. The CFO will mention AI. The board will nod. Nobody will name a metric.
AI has entered the finance conversation with enormous promise, but many CFOs are still operating in first gear. While boards and investors assume AI should help boost performance and strengthen financial discipline, the reality inside the finance function is far more restrained: scattered pilots, basic use cases, and a level of adoption that feels more exploratory than transformational. The pressure for return is very real, but the roadmap to achieving it remains blurry. AI will not fix a broken process, but it will expose one faster than anything else. The CFOs who are winning right now are not running pilots — they are systematically targeting the three core workflows (close, working capital, forecast) where precision creates compounding enterprise value. This article is your roadmap.
