INTHEBLACK April 2026 - Magazine - Page 46
“You’ve got these tools and an increasing
abundance of data. It will be your role to
simplify it and tell stories in ways that help
committees and boards make critical decisions.”
F E AT U R E
KERRI RYAN FCPA, RSL QUEENSLAND
Today’s finance leaders say that the role of the CFO
will expand in ways that would have been considered
unrecognisable even five years ago. And certain parts
of the role may disappear forever as the function
simultaneously becomes broader, more human,
more technical and much more strategically relevant.
“Today, if you are running SAP, its output is your
responsibility. I see it the same way once we are
all using AI. Its output will be our responsibility.”
The main change is that the CFO will become
responsible for more organisational data. Their role
will intensify, not diminish, with technology.
AUTONOMY AND INTELLIGENCE
ACCELERATED CHANGE
By 2050, Khoury believes, CFOs and their finance
teams will not touch any transactional activities.
All of that will have been automated long ago.
“Everything will be about managing people
and using technology to continue to drive business
decisions,” he says.
Quality control of data and reporting will be
managed by smart machines. Those same systems
will constantly validate new data, identify and check
anomalies in real time and surface challenging
exceptions automatically for human intervention.
That is an important point, Khoury says. Human
judgement will remain essential.
“It requires someone who understands the business
to recognise issues and manage the machines to
ensure that they are making decisions based on the
right logic,” he says. “It could just be simple things.
For example, your inventory cannot be negative.
It could be anything from deeply complex issues
to very basic anomalies that can end up becoming
embarrassing if not dealt with properly.”
The continued expansion of the CFO’s responsibility
into data, AI governance and system orchestration
raises the key question of who holds ultimate
responsibility for these advanced outputs, particularly
considering most organisational decisions will be
based on them.
“It is not much different to today,” Khoury says.
Technology systems are one important ingredient
in the future CFO’s recipe for success. Another, says
Rohit Selvaratnam FCPA, CFO at Mindhive Global,
is the dramatically increased focus on the human
challenge behind rapid change.
“We know AI is now beginning to play an increased
role in terms of the workplace and how we do
things,” he says. “But emotional intelligence in
the leadership and management of people will
become increasingly important.”
Selvaratnam believes the next-generation CFO
will be as focused on managing people through
cultural, technological and workplace transitions
as they will be on interpreting and managing
numbers. That is partly because there will be people
within the business who will adopt to change and
new technologies quickly, and there will be people
who do not. “We’ve got to understand that and
always be wary of it.”
He sees the two long-term challenges for CFOs
as helping people to adopt new technology while
concurrently helping them to prevent becoming
professionally obsolete.
“Every individual needs to manage that very real
risk,” he says. “That is about being comfortable
and conversant with new technologies, while also
building one’s own emotional intelligence to work
within the business in a different way.”
46 INTHEBLACK APRIL 2026 SPECIAL EDITION
