Today’s chief financial officers (CFOs) aren’t just leaders of cash flow and financial statements. They’re architects of business growth. At Unilever, Fernando Fernandez put CFO strategy into action, driving bold moves like separating divisions to sharpen focus and boost performance. His results-driven leadership earned him a promotion to top executive, and signals what many companies now recognize — the best CFOs already think like CEOs.
It’s a difficult role to navigate, however. Rising economic volatility, fueled by tariffs, inflation, and supply chain disruptions, means CFOs must make decisions that keep the day-to-day operations running smoothly and costs low while taking risks that bring long-term value. With nearly 70% of CFOs worried about hitting their end-of-year financial goals and 40% extremely worried, the stakes have never been higher.
The right CFO strategy can help you navigate this delicate balance. We’ll share our top tips for adapting your approach to today’s rapidly changing economic landscape. Download our latest Strategic CFO Report for deeper insights into the biggest challenges and opportunities facing finance leaders across the U.S., U.K., Ireland, France, and Germany.
Uncover the top priorities for CFOs in North America and Europe this year to set your strategy up for success.
Tip 1: Invest in AI and human talent
CFOs can’t control interest rates or tariffs. However, they are taking charge of what they can. Optimizing teams, technology, and processes internally is one way to position the organization for growth despite the market’s unpredictability.
So instead of reactive cuts, modern CFOs are shifting to intentional investments, especially in AI and the people who use it. AI will certainly enhance efficiency in a business, but forward-thinking CFOs recognize that only their employees have the power to unlock its full potential. That’s why many are investing in talent by upskilling and reskilling.
Thoughtful AI investments for faster and smarter processes
As the pressure to drive growth intensifies, CFOs are making AI their top investment strategy for the next six to 12 months. According to Coupa’s latest Strategic CFO Report, 40% of finance leaders plan to invest in AI to fuel growth initiatives. From streamlining operations and enhancing financial forecasting to improving fraud detection and accelerating decision-making, AI and automation are reshaping the finance function. And this momentum shows no signs of slowing — 100% of CFOs surveyed plan to make AI investments over the next year.
Even small companies with limited investment opportunities can achieve big wins with AI, especially around invoice management. Take AP automation software that uses AI for optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning. It enables automatic data extraction and validation from invoices and POs to not only increase productivity and free up teams for more strategic work that drives growth, but also improve the accuracy of financial forecasting. The result? CFOs make smarter, more informed decisions. AI-powered fraud detection automatically catches duplicate invoices, vendor anomalies, and pricing mismatches before they are processed, saving valuable resources, time, and money.
Hear directly from CFOs at Coupa and FormLabs about how they’re incorporating AI into their financial strategies.
Build a future-ready workforce right now
Investing in AI is only part of the strategy. More advanced tools, like vendor risk assessment and forecast reporting, require finance teams to carefully validate data inputs, define appropriate business rules, and interpret outputs within the correct strategic and operational context.
In the coming months, talent investment (38%) ranks third on the priority list for finance leaders, a sharp reversal from 2024, when it ranked among the lowest in that year’s Coupa Strategic CFO Report. While downsizing the workforce is often seen as a way to cut costs and protect margins, it’s not a long-term solution. Many CFOs are recognizing that their workforce needs to adapt alongside AI advancements, and simply automating invoicing or other quick fixes won’t be enough. Teams must sharpen their skills alongside AI and understand how to validate data and set rules for AI tools to unlock the greatest value.
Top Skills for Future-Ready Finance Teams
| Skill | How it’s used |
| Cross-functional communication | Using spend visibility dashboards to brief procurement and operations teams on trends and risks, then turn those insights into compelling narratives that drive alignment and action |
| Compliance logic | Setting up compliance parameters in compliance-as-a-service tools and mapping regulatory frameworks to internal workflows and controls |
| Fraud rule building | Understanding and inputting logic-based rules for fraud detection software, such as amount limits or expense submissions outside typical approval windows |
| Data literacy | Validating AI-generated forecasts, such as reviewing flagged anomalies in projected cash flow caused by discrepancies in invoices or purchase orders, ensures finance teams can trust and act on the insights with confidence |
| Strategic thinking | Translating financial data into strategic business insights that support long-term planning, M&A, scenario modeling, and growth initiatives |
Don’t just hire those with traditional finance credentials. Build a future-ready team by seeking analytical thinkers with digital fluency and a knack for cross-functional problem-solving. Invest in upskilling your current employees, too — a blend of finance fundamentals with skills like scenario modeling and data interpretation will empower your people to drive strategy while AI takes care of the heavy lifting.
Tip 2: Think of data as a business commodity
Data is one of your most valuable assets. Decisions need to be made quickly in today’s volatile business environment, where a new tariff or supply shortage requires immediate action. Yet, 41% of finance leaders say they cannot react quickly due to data challenges.
This problem compounds for global companies and those pursuing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) — currently the second-highest growth strategy among CFOs — where siloed systems and integration complexities act as bottlenecks. Companies that want to use AI need clean, standardized data, and a lot of it. Building a modern data foundation is non-negotiable if CFOs want to get the most out of their AI and gain a competitive advantage. What CFOs need is a master data management strategy.
How to Get Started with Master Data Management
| Step | What to do |
| Step 1: Identify important data domains | Start with data that matters to the finance function, like spend, vendor, customer, product, and employee data. Work with IT to cleanse, standardize, and centralize this data and ensure you’re working with trusted data. |
| Step 2: Audit existing systems | Work with IT and procurement to assess where data lives today. Find out how it’s structured and where inconsistencies or silos exist. |
| Step 3: Invest in the right tools | Look for platforms that support:
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| Step 4: Establish data ownership | Create a cross-functional data governance council and set KPIs for data accuracy and accessibility. |
| Step 5: Align data strategy with finance objectives | Ensure the structure and flow of data support real-time forecasting, scenario planning, risk modeling, and spend visibility. |
This involves identifying the most critical data needed to run the business. Then, you need to consolidate and cleanse it into a centralized source of truth, followed by implementing protocols that maintain accuracy over time. CFOs need to become key stakeholders in the company’s data architecture, not just consumers of reports. Partnering with IT will be critical for finance leaders to make data easily accessible.
Tip 3: Focus on strategic cost management and allocation
When it comes to cost management, the tools you invest in are just as important as how much you invest. Forward-looking finance leaders are moving beyond back-office automation and targeting AI that actively supports spend optimization. Nearly 40% of finance leaders say their top AI priority over the next six to 12 months is using it to evaluate direct and indirect spending to identify cost savings opportunities.
Typically, organizations have been more willing to experiment with AI in indirect spend, where the perceived risk of disruption is lower compared to production-critical direct spend. However, proven success from AI in procurement is changing that.
With AI-powered insights and intelligent categorization, CFOs can now work more closely with procurement teams to gain visibility into direct costs, reduce maverick spend, and uncover opportunities for consolidation or negotiated savings. E-procurement platforms with total spend capabilities surface this information in real time, helping finance turn overlooked expenses into measurable value. As trust in AI-driven insights grows, organizations increasingly extend these tools into direct spend strategies.
“As AI capabilities advance across the enterprise technology landscape, finance leaders face a critical strategic question: how to evaluate and orchestrate these tools to maximize organizational impact. The answer isn’t deploying AI indiscriminately, but creating a deliberate framework that identifies where intelligent automation and predictive analytics deliver the most meaningful transformation.”
— Michael Agresta, Chief Financial Officer, Coupa
Modern procurement management should be a key tool in the CFO’s toolbox for executing broader financial strategies. By embedding AI into intake and orchestration workflows, finance can ensure that every request and purchasing decision is compliant and aligned with budget goals. That upstream discipline leads to better downstream results: predictable spend, fewer budget surprises, and improved forecasting accuracy.
Tip 4: Risk management should be a top priority — but don’t put corporate responsibility completely on the back burner
As regulatory pressures mount and risk becomes harder to predict, CFOs are expected to lead the charge, not just report from the sidelines. Today, 40% of finance leaders are unsure about their organization’s ability to maintain cybersecurity compliance. Meanwhile, 38% express concern over navigating evolving financial regulations. These top two compliance worries reflect a broader challenge: balancing operational agility with governance in an era of constant digital and geopolitical disruption.
Top compliance concerns for CFOs
CFOs need AI-driven systems to adapt and scale the detection of risks across all operations. One of the most strategic moves CFOs are making is strengthening supply chain collaboration to reduce risk exposure and improve control. As supplier networks expand or new suppliers are needed as disruptions or tariffs impact availability, companies need to onboard and work more closely with suppliers. That’s why more than one in three finance leaders prioritize better collaboration with suppliers, aiming to negotiate stronger terms and ensure compliance alignment.
AI-powered spend management platforms now enable real-time visibility into supplier performance, risk indicators, and ESG metrics like emissions or labor practices. While ESG may not be a legal mandate in every market, it remains a reputational and strategic concern, especially in Europe.
Assessing your current financial strategy
As quickly as the market changes, CFOs need to regularly assess whether their current approach and financial tools are working and still serve the company’s long-term goals. A simple, focused evaluation can surface new growth opportunities and align finance more closely with strategic planning to navigate today’s economic uncertainty.
Here are four questions CFOs can ask to begin that process:
Where are our biggest opportunities for technological improvement?
At a glance, this might seem like a simple exercise. It’s easy to see that invoice approvals or reporting can be automated. But for many CFOs, the bigger opportunity lies in rethinking not just what gets automated but how finance teams use technology to make decisions and build resilience.
CFOs should think about:
- Are we still using spreadsheets, email chains, or siloed tools for complex workflows, like capital planning or intercompany reconciliation?
- Are team members stitching together data from different tools to create reports?
- Are approvals delayed because the process lacks automation or clarity?
- Could time be better spent on strategic initiatives than tedious, repetitive tasks?
- Why haven’t we made changes yet? Is there a fear of disruptions from replacing legacy systems? Or is it a lack of alignment across finance, procurement, and IT?
What bottlenecks exist in our current financial processes?
A bottleneck is rarely just a software issue. It’s often a mix of outdated workflows, limited upskilling, and a lack of process governance. To fix them, CFOs need to take a diagnostic approach to break down core finance functions. Where is the friction? And why is it happening?
CFOs should map out key processes for:
- Month-end close
- Procurement approvals
- Forecasting and scenario planning
- Budget reconciliation
- Capital expenditure review
Questions to think about include:
- Where do things slow down?
- Where are people waiting for inputs, chasing data, or improvising with spreadsheets or some other make-shift solution?
- How often are there manual errors or other issues slipping through the cracks that are causing inaccurate reporting? How much time are employees spending fixing errors after the fact?
Once a bottleneck is identified, you can find out why it’s happening. It might be a process issue due to too many handoffs or a lack of standardization. Perhaps it’s skill gaps amongst the team regarding tools or processes. Or the system is not fully integrated, which requires the team to re-enter everything manually.
How agile and resilient are our financial plans in volatile conditions?
For a long time, financial planning revolved around predictability. That’s certainly not the case today. Inflation spikes, supply chain breakdowns, and sudden revenue shifts make resilience and agility a key cornerstone of a strong finance strategy.
The first step is to assess how your current planning models respond to volatility. Create realistic but disruptive scenarios, such as:
- A 15% tariff increase for key materials
- A 20% drop in customer demand in a key market
- Currency fluctuations impacting global revenue
- A major supplier impacted by a natural disaster
Ask yourself: Do we have models to simulate these impacts? How quickly can we run the numbers and realign plans? Resilient planning with rolling forecasts updated monthly or quarterly, scenario modeling tools, and cross-functional alignment is important to ensure plans reflect financial targets and operational realities.
Are we leveraging data analytics and real-time insights to drive decision-making?
The reality of business today is that it can shift overnight. Timely and accurate data isn’t just a competitive advantage — it’s a financial necessity. But for many CFOs, it’s not about whether that data exists but whether it’s easily accessible in a centralized database.
Identify gaps between data access and action by evaluating your current analytics ecosystem:
- Do our dashboards pull from real-time data sources, or are we manually pulling data and compiling it to run a report?
- Is data siloed by department, single-point solutions, or systems? Or is it centralized and consistent across business units?
- Are teams just gathering data, or generating insights and taking action from it?
Once you do have your data centralized, you want to make it truly actionable. It needs to be embedded into workflows, and teams need to know how to interpret what they’re seeing. CFOs should ask themselves:
- Do our live dashboards have key financial and operational KPIs visible to finance, operations, and leadership teams? Are our dashboards easy to use and understand?
- Do we have predictive models that flag overspending or supplier performance issues? Do we have drill-down capabilities that enable teams to move from high-level trends to root-cause insights quickly?
- Does our team have data fluency? Can they understand KPIs for analytics maturity and interpret and communicate insights from forecasting and reporting to other departments?
“We’re entering a new era where financial strategy and technological innovation are one and the same. Forward-thinking finance leaders recognize that the way we collect, analyze, and act on financial intelligence will fundamentally reshape competitive advantage.”
— Chris Siwek, Vice President of Finance and Procurement, Snyk
90% of CFOs say having a unified spend management platform is crucial to their organization’s success
When it comes to leveraging AI, having a unified platform with comprehensive visibility and management of all business spending is a must. The Coupa AI-native Total Spend Management platform is purpose-built for finance and procurement leaders.
Trained on the world’s largest proprietary B2B dataset, Coupa AI draws insights from over 10 million buyers and suppliers and more than $8 trillion in verified transactions. That means the AI doesn’t just learn from generalized data from your business — it learns from real-world business behavior to surface actionable recommendations across the entire source-to-pay (S2P) cycle.
CFOs using Coupa can quickly regain control over direct and indirect spend, eliminate bottlenecks through intelligent automation, and make smarter decisions that improve margins and mitigate risk. The platform helps predict supplier risk and uncover cost-saving opportunities — all while integrating seamlessly into existing financial workflows and data systems.
As AI evolves, so will your capabilities. Coupa’s platform architecture lets you quickly integrate and apply next-generation AI tools without costly system overhauls.
“We’ve eliminated 10 different systems with Coupa,” says Shaun Carrol, Chief Procurement Officer at Mitie. “That consolidation has given us better control, better visibility, and a higher level of confidence in the data that we have.”
