CFOs face AI talent squeeze amid market volatility

Acquiring and developing AI and digital talent is the top near-term challenge for chief financial officers, according to a Gartner survey of 100 CFOs.

Finance leaders identified two toughest priorities for the next six months: building talent and responding to unpredictable market conditions. The poll was conducted in January and February.

Mallory Bulman, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, said CFOs were operating in an environment shaped by repeated shocks across several fronts.

"CFOs are having to manage through levels of change and volatility that just seem to be accelerating each year: whether it's technology, society, geopolitics or macroeconomics - it's hard to find stability," Bulman said.

The results highlight a problem for finance teams under pressure to adopt AI tools while facing hiring constraints. Many CFOs will struggle to recruit specialist staff because those hires are scarce and expensive.

Gartner advised retraining existing employees rather than relying mainly on external recruitment. It said this approach can help finance functions close digital skills gaps and get more value from software already in place.

"CFOs will find hiring AI and digital talent to meet their top challenge is not easy, and it's expensive. In the near term, they should focus on upskilling their existing workforce to close digital capability gaps and drive more value from the tools they already own," Bulman said. "That means making technology feel practical and accessible for employees, providing reassurance where job security is a concern, and establishing a role-specific AI literacy strategy that builds skills across AI foundations, value, engineering, and governance."

Volatility pressure

The second major concern was responding to unstable market conditions and unexpected events. Gartner said the issue had become even more acute after the survey period, as broader geopolitical disruption added to uncertainty for finance teams.

"After this survey was taken, global disruption has further accelerated with events in the Middle East," Bulman said. "CFOs and their teams have to actively work on handling volatility and shocks because on multiple fronts, this is the operating environment organisations are facing today."

Traditional scenario planning is proving less useful in that environment because it relies on fixed assumptions and can react too slowly when conditions shift quickly, Gartner argued. Instead, finance teams should use adaptive scenario planning based on a mix of internal and external drivers, automated modelling and pre-defined trigger points for contingency action.

Wider challenges

Beyond talent and volatility, Gartner identified three other priorities for finance leaders: driving cross-functional execution against strategy, sustaining workforce performance during constant change, and aligning finance technology and AI plans within a single strategy.

On strategic execution, the firm said CFOs should look beyond standard return-on-investment measures when assessing technology spending. Technology investments should be tied to a broader set of outcomes, including financial, intangible and innovation-related returns.

To sustain workforce performance, finance departments need continuous change management rather than one-off transformation programmes. Gartner recommended maintaining a live transformation calendar, tailoring messages for different stakeholder groups and using change agents across the function.

The fifth issue was aligning finance technology with AI plans. Many finance teams are experimenting with isolated AI tools but are not seeing a broad impact because they lack a structured roadmap. A clearer vision, supported by governance, data, skills planning and cultural change, is needed to identify and scale useful AI applications.

Finance workforce

Gartner also said the shape of finance teams is likely to change over the rest of the decade. By 2030, leading finance organisations will be reshaped by AI and automation, with staff shifting away from traditional control and business-partnering work towards more digitally focused roles.

This would involve finance staff building tools, managing AI-led workflows and delivering insights at scale. Gartner said CFOs should prepare for four shifts in workforce design: from guardians to catalysts, from partners to tool builders, from manual to machine-driven work, and from linear to iterative processes.

The result would be smaller teams with stronger technical skills and a more product-oriented structure. For CFOs managing today's pressures, however, the immediate challenge is equipping current staff for a faster, less predictable operating environment.

The findings underline how quickly the finance brief is expanding beyond reporting and control into workforce planning, technology deployment and risk response.