Paul BarnhurstFP&A Expert Empowering Finance Professionals to Excel Everday

AI forces FP&A leadership to evolve.

2 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, Paul Barnhurst discusses how AI is increasingly handling the routine, "grunt work" traditionally performed by junior analysts in FP&A. He raises two major implications: first, the need to rethink education and training programs to prepare analysts for higher‑level tasks once AI handles the basics; second, the necessity for FP&A leaders to adapt their team‑management frameworks to a landscape where AI does much of the operational work. Barnhurst also cautions against unchecked AI deployment, noting the current marketing hype around "autonomous finance" and urging a balanced approach to how far organizations let AI operate.

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If AI is starting to do more and more of what was often the junior analyst's work, what we sometimes call grunt work, but it's often just the stuff that had to get done to get to that deeper level. And so if a lot of that's done by AI, I think the conversations are happening. How does that change education? How does people get training? But there's also the question, how does that change the way we need to be a leader? Like you said, we need to think about our teams, we need to manage them. Those frameworks are going to change. There's also the question of how far do we let AI go? I think they're 2 separate things. What I mean by that is right now there's a lot of marketing hype of autonomous finance.