Good morning. For CFOs, using the words “uncertainty” and “unprecedented” has become second nature this year.
“There’s a bit of fatigue from uncertainty right now,” Yuval Atsmon, CFO of McKinsey, told me when we met in Washington, D.C., to discuss how finance chiefs navigated 2025 and the impact of AI. He often hears some executives joke, “Can we just have something that has a precedent?”
Following President Donald Trump’s so-called Liberation Day, Atsmon said significant uncertainty emerged around the new administration’s economic and geopolitical agenda. “If I look at the peak of uncertainty, what I was focused on as a CFO was: What are the things that I should be doing that would be helpful in any scenario?” Atsmon said. “The worst thing is inaction,” he added. Acting on what you can control builds resilience, he said.
Key questions included: How can you improve liquidity and operational efficiency? What costs can be delayed or eliminated? Which investments are essential, and which can be stopped?
While uncertainty often drives defensive moves, Atsmon noted the importance of reviewing long-standing strategies and seizing competitive opportunities. “I wouldn’t recommend anyone stop making AI investments at this moment,” he said, adding that some actions are still driven by inertia, not strategy.
“The other thing that I think is different in 2025 than it was over the last 100 years is that so much of resource allocation now happens through the technology function of the company,” Atsmon said.
Yet there’s still uncertainty about AI’s readiness to impact the bottom line. McKinsey already uses AI to handle up to 30% of its tasks—such as faster research and better summarization—but “you can’t really do a full strategic analysis yet,” he said. Timelines vary widely by company.
Atsmon pointed to new McKinsey research estimating profound changes in how work is done by 2030. People will need to reorganize how they create value or take on different activities. For CFOs, curiosity about technology is useful, but the core responsibility is enabling the organization to respond at the right pace—neither moving so fast that it creates financial strain nor so slowly that competitiveness erodes, he said.
For most organizations, he believes AI efforts should be “80% on productivity for growth and 20% on productivity for efficiency.” The biggest opportunity, he said, lies not in reducing headcount but in unlocking better uses of time.
Ultimately, leveraging AI requires a willingness to reimagine how work gets done. It is a cross-functional C-suite effort. “More than ever,” Atsmon said, “managing uncertainty—economic, geopolitical, and technological—comes down to planning for the best, but also preparing for the worst.” Sheryl Estrada [email protected]
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