The CFO's team is getting it from every direction today. It’s expected to accelerate digital change, embrace AI, improve forecasting accuracy, support strategic growth, tighten controls, all while working with leaner teams on increasing business demands.
What’s more, many organizations are finding that making changes to the finance function is never only about technology; this challenge is decisively human. Resistance to change, talent shortages, disconnected systems, and ill-defined expectations around automation all obstruct efforts to modernize the office of the CFO.
Those realities were front and center in a recent discussion with Bottomline Chief Accounting Officer (CAO) Patrick Sunday, who outlined why the transformation of finance is as much about organizational readiness as it is about what software can do today.
“What makes a finance department more of a value add is being able to do the real work of transformation,” Sunday said. That includes “making things more efficient, getting a forecast in the hands of business leaders quicker, closing the books faster, providing insights around how the business is performing earlier,” to power better, faster decisions.
Transformation is a People Thing
Organizations have spent years investing in automation, analytics, and cloud-based finance systems. Yet too many transformation initiatives stall. According to Sunday, one of the biggest reasons is that leaders underestimate the difficulty of changing mindsets and operating models.
“One of the challenges to meaningful technology change is the fact that a lot of people are still resistant to it,” Sunday said. He concedes that this often means “...doing things differently. You have to buy in and embrace the IT transformation.”
Even when automation is implemented successfully, teams can experience genuine trust issues with machine outputs. Initial hesitation is understandable, but it can and does undermine the efficiencies organizations are trying to achieve. “Some people have a hard time trusting automation,” Sunday said, adding that such a mindset “defeats the purpose of automating.”
The talent side of the equation is equally vexing. Organizations are competing for finance professionals who not only understand accounting and compliance, but also have hands-on process change experience and the ability to work cross-functionally.
“People who have done a transformation, bought into the concept, and who understand what ‘good’ looks like are a scarce human resource,” Sunday confirmed.
That scarcity is changing hiring priorities across the office of the CFO. Traditional accounting expertise remains critical, but organizations now need finance pros who can bridge operations, technology, analytics, and strategy. The CFO’s team is no longer expected to simply close the books. It is expected to help drive the business forward.
A Central Nervous System for Business
As companies grow more data-driven and interconnected, finance stands out as one of the few functions that touches virtually every part of the business in some way.
“The unique role that finance plays is that it is connected to every function,” Sunday said. “Finance has to be able to speak the language of product, sales, technology, information security, cyber security, and every other aspect of operations.”
That enterprise-wide remit gives finance leaders a strategic role in crafting decisions around investment, growth, and efficiency. But it also raises expectations dramatically. As its responsibilities expand, the office of the CFO is now expected to guide business leaders on everything from capital allocation and spending decisions to forecasting models and scalability planning. In many companies, finance has become the central hub connecting business performance data across departments.
“You almost become, by nature, a jack of all trades,” Sunday said. “You have to understand it all, versus living and growing in a business silo.”
That complexity is also changing how decision-makers evaluate tech investments. The market is crowded with pandemic-era CFO tools promising automation and efficiency gains. But companies are avoiding point solutions that ultimately cause friction.
Sunday said the priority today is finding expandable solutions that integrate cleanly into existing financial architectures and reduce the burden of reconciliation, data hygiene and manual workflows.
An emphasis on interoperability is one reason that Payment Service Providers and technology partners that specialize in APIs and connectivity are playing a central role in modernization efforts. As the B2B ecosystem becomes more complex and interconnected, organizations increasingly need to bridge systems that were not designed to work together.
AI Will Reforge Finance, in Time
Few topics are generating more attention in finance than agentic AI and the possibility of autonomous operations. Yet Sunday cautions that many underestimate the operational complexity involved in deploying AI at scale in B2B environments. For now, the most immediate value comes from using AI to improve efficiency, accelerate data analysis, and help finance teams manage growing workloads more effectively.
“The first step is utilizing available tools to be more efficient, to analyze more data, and really be able to leverage that capability now,” he said. The more ambitious vision of autonomous finance workflows is far more difficult because the real world is filled with exceptions, inconsistent data, and human judgment calls.
“There isn’t a playbook that says I’m going to create an AI agent, but you have to train it to do steps one through 10 using your current data and system environment,” Sunday said. “The real world doesn’t work that way. There are always exceptions.”
It all points to a more measured approach to AI adoption. Rather than trying to replace personnel, for example, companies are focusing on augmenting teams with tools that automate repetitive tasks, freeing more time for strategic analysis and decision-making. Sunday believes organizations need to view AI adoption on a long-term maturity curve rather than as an instant replacement for the work of the CFO.
“People need to understand that this is going to be very much a multi-year situation,” he said, advising those shopping for systems to spend strategically. For today’s finance leaders, that may be the central challenge defining the future office of the CFO: balancing innovations with operational realities while building organizations capable of staying ahead of trends. That takes great technology, plus talented teams.