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Microsoft announced new features for Copilot in Excel on Thursday to help finance teams automate tasks such as modeling, closing books, monthly reporting, and variance analysis through reusable "skills." The company also expanded third-party data providers and plans to distribute skills via the Marketplace. This move comes amid intensifying competition in the CFO software market.

KPMG's latest quarterly AI pulse survey shows that the deployment rate of coordinated AI agents has doubled to 18%, but only 26% of enterprises have real-time cost visibility, making cost management a key bottleneck in large-scale application.

Maxima has released an AI agent 'Max' for enterprise accounting teams, integrating transaction processing, month-end closing, and accounting intelligence to reduce manual repetitive work. The agent works in conjunction with existing ERP systems, supporting audit trails and human approval. Early user feedback indicates savings of 60 hours per employee per month, with Scale AI's closing cycle reduced from one month to two weeks.

Early in his career, Bas Lustenhouwer was hindered when applying for CFO positions at startups due to a lack of direct experience. He chose to provide CFO services to multiple startups without pay to gain hands-on experience, then served as CFO at diamond B2B platform Nivoda for over six years, helping it raise over $100 million. Now, as CFO of AI robotics company Dexory, he is addressing complex challenges in global expansion with a lean finance team and automation tools.

Recent research by Ernst & Young (EY) shows that only 21% of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) rate their artificial intelligence (AI) readiness as 'leading' or 'advanced.' The report notes that finance teams with higher AI readiness are more likely to identify AI's value in core business operations, but most CFOs remain challenged by measuring return on investment (ROI), and there are notable gaps in team capabilities.

On June 17, Frontier Climate announced that AI company Anthropic has joined its carbon removal buyer group, with the group adding $915 million in new investments to support carbon removal technologies with gigaton-scale potential. This brings Frontier's collective purchase commitments to a cumulative total of $1.8 billion.

CFOs currently face a highly volatile operating environment and need to make forward-looking strategic decisions, but traditional forecasts are mostly based on historical internal data, which is limited in perspective and lagging. Simone Ferrari, Product Manager at Board, points out that key external data (such as consumer sentiment, tariffs, and commodity prices) is crucial for planning, and modern FP&A methods can help companies predict the future more accurately through steps such as event-driven planning, unified data views, and signal filtering.

For CFOs of SaaS companies, healthy growth metrics no longer fully reflect the overall state of the business. A company may show impressive sales figures and continuously expanding annual recurring revenue (ARR), yet subsequently face narrowing profit margins, slowing cash flow, and rising churn risk. This article points out that as businesses scale, operational gaps in post-sale processes—such as renewal delays, payment failures, billing anomalies, and global tax compliance—amplify costs. As the market shifts toward efficient growth and stronger cash conversion, CFOs must audit the post-sale transaction layer with the same rigor applied to the sales pipeline, distinguishing transactions that genuinely require human judgment from those that rely on manual intervention only due to process lag, thereby building true operational leverage.

According to the 2026 report by Compensation Advisory Partners (CAP), median CFO compensation at large US listed companies rose 8%, with long-term incentive awards growing 12%, higher than the CEO's 9%. Although CFO turnover has eased from its peak, it remains above historical levels, with companies favoring experienced financial leaders.

The Q2 2026 CFO survey released by Grant Thornton on Wednesday shows that only 37% of finance leaders are optimistic about the U.S. economic outlook over the next six months, a 20-quarter low; however, 67% of respondents plan to increase information technology and digital transformation investment over the next year, with AI becoming a strategic core for enterprises.