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Generic AI has a place.It's not in your financial statements. Discover Verity™, the auditable AI builtfor finance operations. The Adaptive CFO The CFO pulse:lessons to take into 2026 THE YEAR IN FINANCE:DEFENDING WHILE TRANSFORMING Distributed in Supported by A year of disruption tested CFOs’ resilience. Armed with lessons in agility,technology and trust, finance leaders are ready to navigate the challenges ahead CFOs spent much of 2025 in defensive mode, protecting margins amid persistent cost pressuresand geopolitical uncertainty. But despite a challenging year, finance leaders continued to expand theirinfluence – taking charge of data, analytics and AI initiatives that are reshaping the finance function. ALTHOUGH THERE IS INTEREST IN AI,CONFIDENCE IN SUCCESSFULADOPTION IS LACKING Fiona Bond Fiona BondA freelance journalistcovering all areas offinance and investing Ben EdwardsA freelance journalistspecialising in finance,business, law and of CFOs believe they can accelerate AI adoptionacross the finance function of CFOs express confidence in hiring andretaining digital finance talent Gartner, 2025 AS BUSINESS GETS MORE COMPLEX,THE CFO ROLE IS EXPANDING FARBEYOND FINANCE Beyond the hype:five principles formaking finance Being powered byintelligent automation those outputs are auditable to main-tain regulatory compliance.“This is all about a chain of thought.It’s about showing the reasoning orthe way in which an AI system or agentarrives at a particular conclusion andthen documenting that,” says Ung.Another key component of building Theway organisations can becomestrategicengines for growth is byusing automation in a smarter way. Forexample, BlackLine has created theStudio360 platform to help businessesautomate workflows in the office ofthe CFO. To illustrate this point, oneBlackLine customer had around 4,500manual tasks to complete as part oftheir month-end close. By automat- “This is not something you can justGoogle and find a ‘how to’ guide on, orwatch a YouTube video. We are build-ing playbooks and refining them, butwe have to work with our customerson this,” says Ung. “It is a collabora-tive journey, because this is such a With trust as the foundation, these five principles show how theoffice of the CFO can harness AI to move from compliance to Operating with totalconfidence and controlFinance and accounting departmentsunderpinningthat with a clear vision,finance and accounting leaders can easethose day-to-day demands and help trans-formtheir departments into strategicpartners for growth. BlackLine’s vision for the future is aworld where companies have a com-bined AI and human workforce thatoperates in a complementary way. Thisapproach streamlines and optimises toreal-time decision-making,”saysUng.By redesigning processes and will have greater control and visibilityover their organisation’s entire finan-cialecosystem.“This means you’renot having to second-guess or rec-oncile the numbers after everythinghas happened,” says Ung. “If you canget to that real-time data flow, you canrespond in near real time versus daysor weeks or months.” Verity allows users to manage growingdata volumes by automatically handlingtasks such as identifying unmatchedtransactionsor handling remittanceprocessesand identifying paymentterms in invoices.Finally, Verity can deliver agentic AIexperiences that are designed to easethe workload on finance and accountingteams and give human workers the timeto focus on more strategic matters.“At BlackLine, we’re really creating adigital workforce – AI agents that canaugment work and operate like peoplein your org chart,” says Ung.For example, AI agents can performpreparation tasks that would otherwisetake humans many hours to complete.The technology can also help supportcollectionsworkflows,for exampleby automatically calling a customer tochase unpaid invoices. AI agents canthen identify a propensity to pay andopen a dispute workflow if needed,rather than a human having to place Becoming a strategicengine for growth Finance and accounting leaders should prioritise transparency,For CFOs, AI withoutan audit trail is a liability What frequently gets in the way of thisstrategic thinking is that many financeteams are bogged down in time-con-suming day-to-day tasks, such as clos-ing the books, reconciling accounts auditability and human-AI collaboration to unlock the true “If I look at my finance profession-als in my organisation, there’s a lotof time being spent on that tacticalwork, but where I get the most valueas a business stakeholder is for thefinance team to be able to fund the office of the CFO.“Westart with best-in-class AI present as a potential outcome, weneed to slowly scaffold and build thesesteps to get finance professionals com-fortable with how AI is going to work,”says Ung.Finance and accounting teams canalso grow confidence in AI by usingtools that flag risks and highlight wherehumans may need to step in and reviewor focus their efforts. Teams