CFO Priorities 2026: What Finance Leaders Are Focused On

Every year, the major advisory and accounting firms survey hundreds of CFOs to map the priorities shaping corporate finance. In 2026, one theme dominates: the tension between efficiency and growth. Finance leaders are simultaneously tightening overhead, increasing technology budgets, and navigating a talent market that remains stubbornly competitive.

This report synthesizes findings from five major surveys: Deloitte's Q4 2025 CFO Signals (200 CFOs at $1B+ companies), Gartner's 2026 CFO surveys (200+ CFOs), PwC's Pulse Survey (83 CFO respondents from Fortune 1000 companies), Grant Thornton's Q4 2025 CFO Survey (230+ mid-market finance leaders), and BDO's 2025 CFO Outlook Survey (500 CFOs across key industries).

1. Top 10 CFO Priorities for 2026

Across all major surveys, the same themes emerge repeatedly. The ranking below synthesizes findings from Gartner, Deloitte, PwC, Grant Thornton, and BDO, weighted by the number of respondents citing each priority. Percentages represent the approximate share of CFOs ranking each item among their top concerns.

2. Economic Outlook: What CFOs Expect

CFO confidence has recovered meaningfully from the lows of 2022-2023, but the mood is cautious optimism rather than exuberance. There's a notable gap between how CFOs feel about their own companies versus the broader economy.

PwC's Pulse Survey, fielded in May 2025 among Fortune 1000 executives, found that 65% of CFOs are adjusting financial forecasts and budgets in response to volatility. U.S. economic policy shifts and trade uncertainty are the primary sources of concern, particularly for mid-market companies with less capacity to absorb sudden cost increases.

The bottom line: CFOs are confident enough to invest, but disciplined enough to demand returns. Risk appetite is rising, but it's channeled toward strategic bets (technology, M&A, growth functions) rather than broad expansion of overhead.

3. Technology & AI Investment Priorities

Technology investment is the priority that has moved most sharply upward. Deloitte's Q4 2025 survey found that 50% of CFOs rank digital transformation of finance as their top priority, while 54% say integrating AI agents in their finance departments will be a transformation priority.

AI Investment: High Ambition, Early Execution

The gap between AI ambition and execution is striking. Nearly 9 in 10 CFOs view AI as critical, but most are still allocating a sliver of their technology budget to it. Only about a third feel confident they can actually deliver meaningful AI impact. This confidence gap is one of the defining challenges of 2026.

Broader Technology Budget Trends

Gartner's February 2026 research found that technology budgets are set to rise for 75% of CFOs, with 48% planning increases of 10% or more. Sales and IT departments are expected to see the largest budget increases, with over half of CFOs planning higher spending and 28% anticipating double-digit growth in both areas.

4. Talent: The Persistent Challenge

Despite the rise of AI and automation, talent remains a top-four concern for CFOs in 2026. The challenge has shifted from pure hiring difficulty to a more nuanced skills transformation problem: how to build a finance team that can operate in an AI-augmented environment.

The talent picture in 2026 is defined by three concurrent trends. First, overall headcount growth is collapsing: Gartner reports expectations have dropped from 6% growth in 2025 to just 2% in 2026. Second, the roles that are growing are increasingly technical: data analytics, AI implementation, and process automation. Third, 49% of CFOs say their top talent priority is automating processes to free existing employees for higher-value work (Deloitte Q4 2025).

PwC found that finance executives rank talent acquisition and retention as a more serious risk (55%) than their C-suite peers (38%), recognizing that achieving digital transformation and analytics goals requires specialized skills that are in short supply.

The workforce implications are significant. Gartner found that 42% of CFOs anticipate some AI-driven headcount reduction in SG&A functions, with HR the most-cited area for cuts (57%), followed by corporate IT (53%), legal and compliance (40%), corporate finance (36%), and marketing (27%). Nearly half of organizations also expect direct labor rate increases exceeding 4% year-over-year, driven by labor scarcity.

Cherry Bekaert's mid-market survey reinforces the skills gap: 71% of mid-market CFOs plan to develop or train existing finance teams, and 61% intend to hire new talent in the next year. The reality for growing companies is that they need people with a blend of finance expertise and technology fluency, and those individuals are expensive and hard to find. For a deeper look at the accounting talent challenge, see our Accounting Talent Crisis 2026 report.

5. Cost Management Strategies

Cost optimization in 2026 is not about across-the-board budget cuts. CFOs are taking a surgical approach: trimming overhead while protecting revenue-generating investments. Gartner's October 2025 research provides the clearest picture of this strategy.

Where Budgets Are Growing vs. Shrinking

Gartner's February 2026 budget research reveals clear winners and losers in 2026 budget allocation. Sales and IT are seeing the largest increases, reflecting the dual imperative of revenue growth and technology modernization. HR faces the sharpest pullback.

6. How SMB Finance Priorities Differ from Enterprise

Most CFO surveys skew toward large enterprises ($1B+ revenue). But the priorities of a $10M business differ meaningfully from a Fortune 500 company. Grant Thornton and Cherry Bekaert provide the best data on mid-market and SMB finance leaders, and the differences are instructive.

Cherry Bekaert's 2025 survey of 200 mid-market CFOs ($5-250M revenue) underscores the data quality gap. An overwhelming 84% of mid-market finance executives said improving data quality and integration was their top priority, and 48% called integration complexity their number one challenge. By contrast, enterprise CFOs have generally solved the data plumbing problem and are focused on what to do with the data they already have.

For benchmarks on how much companies at different revenue levels spend on their finance function, see our SMB Finance Team Benchmarks report.

7. Strategic vs. Operational Time Allocation

One of the most consistent findings across CFO surveys is the gap between how finance leaders want to spend their time and how they actually spend it. Deloitte's Finance Trends 2026 research highlights that the finance function's scope continues to expand, with CFOs expected to lead on everything from AI governance to sustainability reporting.

This gap is even more pronounced at smaller companies. When the finance leader is also handling bookkeeping oversight, AP/AR, tax compliance, and insurance renewals, strategic work gets crowded out entirely. The 2026 push toward automation and AI adoption is, in large part, an attempt to close this gap by offloading routine work to technology.

Deloitte found that 49% of CFOs cite automating processes to free employees for higher-value work as a top priority, and 49% plan to hire or promote internally to help manage employee costs. The implication: the finance function of 2026 should have fewer people doing transactional work and more people doing analysis, forecasting, and strategic advising.

8. What This Means for Growing Businesses

The priorities that dominate enterprise CFO surveys trickle down to growing businesses, often in amplified form. When a Fortune 500 CFO worries about cost optimization, they have a 50-person FP&A team to run the analysis. When a $15M business faces the same pressure, the owner is often doing it on a spreadsheet after hours.

For a complete view of how growing businesses are structuring their finance function, see our Fractional CFO Industry Report and Outsourced Accounting Report 2026.

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