An AI budgeting agent can execute spoken financial instructions, but CFOs and finance teams refuse to let it touch their numbers. The trust gap is stark: a small group of FP&A leaders want full AI adoption, while most remain deeply skeptical about AI handling numeric data.
We created an agent where you can just articulate all the changes you want to make. Up these numbers, down these numbers, add this headcount, give this merit increase, and then the agent can actually do all the work on your behalf. So I brought this up. I'm like, hey, you're using all this amazing reporting analysis capabilities. Like, why are you not using the budgeting capabilities, right? The entire tone of the conversation changed. It was like, oh no, I would never let AI touch a number. And for me, it was actually an interesting moment. And I've been now going away and talking to as many people as I can to pressure test this, and there seems to be a divide. Don't get me wrong, there's super progressive FP&A CFOs that are like currently a small minority, I think, of like AI for everything. But there is a very big chunk of the CFO and FP&A teams which are very apprehensive of AI, whether it's a budget or forecast or, you know, even on the close side, it's like apprehensive around actually touching or modifying numbers. It makes sense if you think about where AI is today, like it totally makes sense. I was just surprised at first.
Trust and Leadership Lessons for FP&A From 100+ Top Leaders with CFO Jon Laudie
