The end of finance jobs
The biggest opportunity for finance in 2026.
JPMorgan has over 700 open jobs related to artificial intelligence.
Morgan Stanley built a firmwide AI team to drive a human-centric approach.
Companies just stopped hiring Excel jockeys.
They are hiring people who can leverage AI.
Your future value is not in your technical skill.
It’s in your human skill.
Finance jobs, as we have historically defined them, are ending.
Not because finance is becoming less important.
But because the conditions that once justified entire layers of finance work are no longer needed.
What finance used to be paid for.
For 40 years, the value proposition of finance was simple and defensible.
Finance existed to produce numbers that others couldn’t reliably produce.
You controlled risk.
You closed the books.
You ensured accuracy.
You reconciled systems.
You reported what happened.
If you were a CFO, your authority came from your proximity to the truth of the numbers and your ability to enforce discipline around them.
And for a long time, that was enough.
Data was fragmented. Systems were slow.
Information traveled upward through layers of manual work.
In that world, simply having the numbers created power.
What Happened To Finance
Numbers stopped being scarce.
Today, every company is saturated with data.
Executives have dashboards.
Boards receive automated packs.
Managers run their own reports.
AI systems generate forecasts in seconds.
The bottleneck is no longer production.
It’s interpretation.
The hard problem is no longer
“What happened?”
It’s “What does this mean, and what should we do now?”
This is the moment where traditional finance roles begin to fracture.
The end of finance jobs has begun.
Finance careers were built on a ladder that assumed one thing would always be true:
That insight emerges after reporting.
But AI breaks that sequence.
When AI can reconcile, forecast, and summarize faster and more consistently than humans, large parts of the traditional finance stack lose their economic justification.
Newly launched GPT-5.2 matters far more to finance than most people realize.
It writes better text and its strength is reasoning across real-world knowledge tasks, the exact category of work finance has historically treated as human-only.
This work will slowly disappear.
Entry-level analysts
Reporting-heavy FP&A roles
Manual variance analysis
Spreadsheet-driven consolidation
And this is why so many CFOs feel pressure without being able to name the source of it. The work they were trained for is ending.
Once AI crosses the threshold where large companies trust it to run real operations, finance loses the final excuse for delay.
And once reliability is solved, the sequence collapses permanently.
Why CFOs Are Being Forced into Storytellers
Storytelling is a lie.
Until you realize it’s structured truth.
And every company wants it.
In finance, storytelling doesn’t ignore facts. It frames reality.
This is why ‘Storyteller’ is suddenly one of the hottest job titles in Corporate America.
Not because companies want prettier words.
But because the old systems stopped working.
Attention is fragmented.
Trust is harder to earn than ever.
And now AI can generate infinite content instantly.
Which means content itself is no longer the advantage.
But meaning is. And emotion is.
When you understand the story, you’ll know three things:
Where to look.
What’s just noise.
What actually matters.
The numbers stop feeling random.
They become signals.
Signals turn into better narratives.
a) Long-form thinking.
b) Repeatable formats.
c) Consistent voices.
d) Clear points of view.
e) Stories that compound over time.
The Wall Street Journal recently noted that job postings mentioning “storyteller” have doubled.
The Bottom Line
According to the World Economic Forum, AI and Big Data are the core skills of 2030.
Every finance leader must master 3 skills:
AI
Big Data
Storytelling
Finance jobs built purely around manual work and reporting will end.
But it does not mean the end of finance leadership.
Finance is moving closer to the CEO, not further away.
But only for those who can translate numbers into meaning.
Finance jobs are ending.
Finance work is not.
And that’s all for today!
See you on Thursday with ChatGPT 5.2 Prompts and finance workflows.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
If you’re building an AI-powered CFO tech startup, I’d love to hear more and explore if it’s a fit for our investment portfolio.
I’m Wouter Born. A CFOTech investor, advisor, and founder of finstory.ai
Find me on LinkedIn