The CFO role is changing is the wrong conversation.
That line implies a gentle curve.
What’s actually happening is a structural break.
The seat can remain. Boards still want a human being to sign the accounts, carry the liability, and tell the story. But the factory under that seat, how finance is staffed, how decisions are made, how models are built, and how governance is proved is ending and being rebuilt in real time.
The old model of finance was designed for a world that no longer exists:
Stable rates
Slow data
Quarterly tempo
Manual guardrails
Linear careers.
The new model demands the opposite:
Volatile macro
Streaming data
Daily tempo
Machine guardrails
Non-linear careers.
If you try to bolt AI onto the old chassis, you’ll strip the screws.
Below is a fresh, CFO-first blueprint, rooted in what I’m seeing across what is ending, what replaces it, and how to move now without blowing up risk or credibility.
Let’s take a look at what’s happening to the CFO role at Salesforce.
2006: CFO at Hyperion
2008: CFO at Gilead Sciences
2025: President & COFO at Salesforce
Robin Washington is the first woman to become Chief Operating and Financial Officer (COFO) at a Fortune 100 company.
The traditional CFO role is ending within Fortune 100 and beyond. But the CFO isn’t trying to become the COO. They always were. CFOs ran:
Vendor stack
GTM execution
Data architecture
Planning systems
Headcount strategy
Risk, cash, and compliance
Operations today aren’t about warehouses.
It’s about dashboards, decisions, and precision.
And no one understands those levers better than Finance.
You can’t scale decision-making if finance and operations live in silos. In high-functioning teams, shared accountability is dead. They want one leader who sees it all. And owns the outcome. That leader is the CFO. Not the spreadsheet CFO.
But the one who speaks GTM fluently.
Who talks in tradeoffs, not just budgets.
Who connects cost to capacity to culture.
The one who doesn’t just ask, Can we afford it?
But says, Does this even make sense?
Robin Washington runs finance and operations at a $300B+ cloud giant. The COFO badge isn’t about vanity. It’s a signal for what CFOs are becoming
But there’s more to it.
Let’s dive in.
The Great CFO Collapse
For 40 years, finance trained judgment by grinding mechanics. You built muscle memory in Excel, reconciled a thousand ledgers, and suffered through make-it-by-Monday board asks. That apprenticeship produced confidence.
You learned what breaks, where it breaks, and how to fix it under pressure.
That base is disappearing.
Last Thursday I used Claude to build a 24-month SaaS forecast in 5 minutes in Excel, with traceable formulas, yellow-cell drivers, churn, new logo velocity, hiring cadence, a timed fundraise, and a live cash chart.
Was it perfect? No.
Did it get me from zero to credible faster than a 3-day analyst sprint? Absolutely.
Multiply that across reporting close memos, vendor variance reviews, cohort bridges, and scenario decks. Mechanics are being automated.
The pyramid’s base. The repetitive work that trained judgment is thinning.
This is the core pipeline risk for the profession. If AI handles the mechanics on day one, where do tomorrow’s CFOs earn judgment?
There are 3 eras of CFOTech
Automate the repetitive (AP routing, close workflows).
Integrate the fragmented (data pipes between ERP, CRM, HRIS, banks).
Augment decisions (recommendations, anomaly triage, scenario steering).
We’re entering Era 3. That looks like:
Finance chat interfaces that actually answer stakeholder questions 24/7 with context, not a pretty BI skin. (“Why did EMEA gross margin drop 220 bps in July?” → Because freight mix shifted + returns + two large discounts; here are the underlying orders and emails.)
Smart AP and vendor intelligence that reads multi-page, unstructured invoices (think cloud providers) and says: “Peers pay 11–14% less on this SKU, renegotiate now; here’s the term sheet template.” That’s not OCR; that’s recommendation.
Rolling forecasts that refresh themselves: daily ingest of CRM pipeline and HRIS changes, reapplying drivers automatically, surfacing only the exceptions that require human escalation.
Remember:
Don’t AI-wash every process. Some problems are still best solved with rules, checklists, or a single SQL view. Use the simplest tool that clears the risk bar.
Start with point solutions that attack one painful seam (invoice leakage, cash allocation, collections prioritization). Short pilots, quick time-to-value, low blast radius. If it fails, rip it out. No religion.
Demand explainability. If a model recommends a discount change or flags a journal entry, it must show its work. Black boxes are compliance time bombs.
Stop measuring AI only in hours saved.
Measure basis-point wins (margin recovered, DSO reduced, cloud spend cut, win-rate lift from pricing recommendations).
That’s where augmentation pays.
Behind every smart CFO, there’s a smart FP&A
Stop treating FP&A as a quarterly ritual.
Pull history, paste into budget, debate targets, publish a beautiful PDF nobody reads.
The business changes daily.
A modern finance nervous system has 3 traits:
Integrated: CRM tells you real demand; HRIS tells you real supply; ERP/banks tell you real cash; product telemetry tells you real unit economics. The model ingests all of it continuously.
Driver-led: No mystical oracle. Explicit drivers that can be challenged: price, volume, churn, mix, hiring, ramp, comp ratios, discount ladders, CAC/LTV by segment.
Conversational: Not a dashboard. But a Q&A that answers your question and reshapes the view for your role. (“As the CXO for EMEA, why did my renewals slide?” → Your SMB segment in DE saw a competitor launch; attach rate fell 14%; here are the affected accounts and playbooks.)
There won’t be one magic algorithm that predicts the future.
Finance is too multi-causal: internal drivers + external shocks + qualitative context.
The answer is a hybrid system:
deterministic logic where rules are stable (revenue recognition, headcount math),
probabilistic models where patterns are noisy (pipeline conversion, seasonality),
and human narrative where the truth lives outside the data (competitive moves, partner failures, supplier strikes).
The future of FP&A is not prettier dashboards. It’s shorter time-to-decision.
Storytelling Can Save You
Everyone will soon have fast, clean numbers.
The edge shifts from production to persuasion.
Boards, investors, and operators don’t want 80 chart slides. They want a coherent, testable story:
What changed (facts).
Why it changed (causality).
What we’ll do (plan).
What we expect (forecast) and the confidence bands around it.
The most valuable deliverable in the CFO Office will be the Decision Brief:
A 2-page narrative that stands on its own without a voiceover and drives a specific action. AI can assemble facts, generate drafts, and visualize scenarios. But the synthesis, the trade-off, the call, is your job.
Storytellers can get the capital allocated.
What’s Actually Ending (so we can stop arguing about it)
The grind as training. The craft will be taught by designed reps, not accidental suffering.
The spreadsheet as the primary system of record. It remains essential but subordinate to governed models and Q&A layers.
The quarterly tempo as default. The business moves weekly; finance must too.
The narrow ledger. Money alone won’t satisfy boards and regulators; the parallel ledger of impact is here.
The idea that producing numbers is value. Explaining numbers to drive action is value.
The CFO chair survives. The operating system beneath it is being rewritten. That’s not a loss of identity. It’s the role fulfilling its highest purpose: stewardship under uncertainty, at speed, with story.
The spreadsheet era made great number-keepers
The AI era will make great decision-makers.
And the real breakthroughs don’t happen in reports or Zoom calls.
They happen in real life, when 100 CFOs gather under one roof to share what’s working, what’s breaking, and what’s next.
On September 26th in Dubai, you can be in those conversations.
With only 100 seats, this event is filling fast.
Be in the room: https://luma.com/5udk521n
You can meet peers who are building AI-powered finance teams, not just talking about them. And you’ll walk away with strategies you can put into practice the next morning.
The Bottom Line
The rituals felt safe.
Close calendars. Model marathons. Board packs that thudded on the table like a promise.
But AI exposed how much of your identity was tied to doing the work by hand. The grief is real. You mastered a game whose rules just changed mid-season.
That doesn’t make you obsolete.
It makes you early, if you’re willing to let go.
Here’s the choice every CFO faces right now:
Door 1: Denial.
Repaint the dashboards. Rename the meetings. Talk about AI at offsites, deploy nothing that moves basis points. You’ll keep the calendar. You’ll lose the room.
Door 2: Delegation Theater.
Spin up an AI task force, outsource the thinking to vendors, and pray compliance signs off. You’ll have pilots and press releases. You won’t have decisions that ship faster.
Door 3: Design.
Rewrite the operating system under the seat you already own. Build a forward model wired to CRM/HRIS/banks. Pilot one augmentation that pays in basis points. Replace the deck with a 2-page Decision Brief. Publish a Finance AI policy that is boring, strict, and keeps you employed. Run a weekly judgment lab so your team earns the reps machines can’t.
Only one of these doors ends with you defining the role that replaces the one that’s ending.
The old CFO operating system is ending.
But if you can design the new one faster than your competitors, the seat you already own becomes the most strategic chair in the company.
And that’s all for today.
See you on Thursday!
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I’m Wouter Born. A CFOTech investor, advisor, and founder of finstory.ai
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