Deloitte’s 2025 fourth-quarter survey of CFOs found that 50% of respondents named digital transformation of finance among their top three priorities for 2026, with 87% predicting that artificial intelligence will be extremely or very important to their finance department’s operations in the coming year.
Second among priorities was cash management optimization (45%). When asked to name their top priorities for finance talent in 2026, nearly half (49%) of the CFOs cited automating processes to free employees to do higher-value work — the most popular response to the question.
In the survey of 200 finance chiefs across North America with at least $1 billion in annual revenues, the leaders registered an average CFO confidence score of 6.6, considered high on Deloitte’s scale and representing the highest reading in four years. See more survey results.