The talk is over. In 2026, it’s time to execute.
When the CFO Alliance, a finance-professional peer community, released its latest report, called Project Greenlight, in late November, the organization said that finance experts expect 2026 to be “the most pivotal year the finance function has faced in a decade.” There’s a lot at stake for CFOs and their organizations, according to the report, including supply-chain risks, pressure to make big AI investments, and the perils of stakeholder misalignment on strategy.
CFO Brew recently spoke with Nick Araco, the CEO of CFO Alliance, to get a sense of why 2026 is shaping up to be a high-stakes year. He also shared what’s top of mind for the finance leaders he’s been speaking with.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What makes you think that 2026 will be such a pivotal year in finance?
2026 has to be a year where we replace debate with data and execution. I call it “informed execution.” We’ve seen such a rapid acceleration, given AI and technology advancements, converge with a year of volatility and uncertainty. Imagine you’re sitting in the seat of a CFO, where you’re at the intersection of that, and you’ve had a 2025 that’s caused you and your enterprises to hit a pause button. You had months, if not a whole year of pause. 2026 has to be a year of execution.
How did the group that worked on the Project Greenlight report identify the top execution risks, and how did it lay out a roadmap for addressing each?
What we did was convene about an hour-and-a-half’s time and openly debated until we got to a point where we agreed on the most material and critical areas of risk. You can imagine we started with a laundry list, because the CFO Alliance population of almost 10,000 or more is very diverse…At the end of the day, we identified four execution risks that most often stall plans, or stall action. [According to the report, these are geopolitical and regulatory disruption, technology and AI adoption, talent and team capabilities, and stakeholder alignment and governance.]
I want to focus on one specific risk: AI adoption. What would you say are the keys to identifying where an organization should be investing its money, but also how to track the ROI?
A year ago at this time, I would tell you that nine out of 10 of our members were saying, ‘We agree, it’s time to lean in, and it’s time to have the right discussions. Let’s bring in cross-functional leaders and cross-level leaders, and let’s make sure we are demonstrating comfort, and make sure that we’re demonstrating through our own actions, an embrace.’ Let me fast forward to where we are in 2025. These discussions need to be about enterprise value and performance. They need to be about, ‘How would this impact our business?’
I’m going to be very specific as to what the discussions need to be and are, because our members are using the following framework around AI. “What’s the specific opportunity or pain point that we are attempting to address…when it comes to AI? Why does it matter now? What’s blocking our progress that we’re even having this discussion? What’s one condition, and if we solve for this, what would be different by X date, and how would we know it helped us?” Those questions they’re using in every conversation, so they can tie it back to value.
What have been the biggest recurring topics in your conversations with CFOs from the past two or three months?
There are three key areas of focus: What type of leader do I want to be in ’26? How do I best stand up the highest performing finance function? And that includes accounting, treasury, FP&A, and capital markets or strategy functions. And then, from an enterprise standpoint, am I really at the forefront of understanding how technology and AI may disrupt our position in our industry, or our industry or business as a whole?
Standing up a high-performing finance function and team [is] more complex than ever before. I’m tired of the bashing of accounting…No one can do their job in finance without a strong accounting function. We’re done complaining about it; we’re going to do something about it. We’re going to try to make accounting sexy again by embracing the AI factor and bringing critical thinking into the accounting skill set.
This report was originally published by CFO Brew.
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