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Gartner Survey Reveals Acquiring and Developing AI and Digital Talent Is CFOs’ Top Near-Term Challenge

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Attendees at the Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo 2026 in Sydney Are Exploring Ways to Meet Top Finance Function Challenges

Harnessing rapidly evolving AI technologies while keeping enterprises and their staff on track amidst a turbulent, high-change environment are the biggest CFO challenges in the next six months, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.

“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,” said Mallory Bulman, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Finance practice.

Mallory Bulman, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, is exploring AI in the finance function with CFOs in Sydney, Australia this week at the Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo 2026.

“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,” said Bulman. “That means making technology feel practical and accessible for employees and establishing a role-specific AI literacy strategy that builds skills across AI foundations, value, engineering, and governance.”According to the Gartner survey of 100 CFOs, taken from January through February 2026, respondents identified building AI talent in the function and responding effectively to unpredictable market conditions and events as their two most challenging priorities in the next six months (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Biggest CFO Challenges for Q2/Q3
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Source: Gartner (March 2026)

“After this survey was taken, global disruption has further accelerated with events in the Middle East,” said Bulman. “CFOs and their teams have to actively work on handling volatility and shocks because on multiple fronts this is the operating environment organizations are facing today.”At the Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo 2026 taking place in Sydney today and tomorrow, attendees are exploring ways to manage these five top challenges:

Acquiring and developing skilled digital and AI talent

Gartner analysts advise that by 2030 leading finance organizations will be reshaped by AI and automation, with finance teams shifting from traditional control and business-partnering roles toward digitally skilled “catalysts” who build tools, manage AI-driven workflows, and deliver insight at scale.In the conference session, Finance 2030: The Finance Workforce at Breakaway Firms, Gartner analysts said CFOs should start now on four workforce shifts—guardians to catalysts, partners to tool builders, manual to machine-driven, and linear to iterative—so finance can operate with smaller, more technical, product-oriented teams.

Responding to unpredictable market conditions

Traditional scenario planning is no longer effective in today’s volatile environment because it relies on static assumptions, over weights internal drivers, and responds too slowly to external shocks.CFOs should instead Navigate Economic Uncertainty With Adaptive Scenario Planning. That means building driver-based models that combine internal and external factors, using technology to automate and simulate scenarios, and defining trigger-based contingency actions so finance can respond quickly as conditions change.

Driving cross functional execution against enterprise and business model strategy

Sustaining workforce performance in a high change environment

In the session, When Change Never Stops, Use Always‑On Change Management, Gartner analysts explained that CFOs should make change management a continuous operating discipline by maintaining a live transformation calendar, adapting narratives to stakeholder personality and context, and activating change agents across finance to sustain momentum and reduce resistance

Unifying finance function technology and AI strategy

While most finance functions are experimenting with AI, impact is often limited because of piecemeal experimentation with isolated tools instead of following a disciplined, structured finance AI roadmap.In the session, The CFO’s Guide to Building a Finance AI Roadmap, attendees learned that a a clear AI vision and target maturity is key to define a modular roadmap across culture, governance, skills, and data. This in turn enables finance to identify, prioritize, pilot, and scale a focused portfolio of AI use cases.

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