As the new year begins, many finance chiefs are finding themselves facing familiar challenges — including a growing need to find and retain top talent, said Alexander Bant, chief of research for Gartner Finance practice. Looking into 2025, CFOs are “acutely focused on making sure that they have the right mix of skills across the enterprise to meet the current growth expectations,” Bant said, citing data from a recent poll of finance leaders taken from a Gartner webinar.

Finance chiefs today face the mandate of fostering sustainable growth and investing further into emerging technologies, while also managing daily financial responsibilities, all with under-staffed or overworked finance teams. Finding the right combination of talent, skills and technologies to execute on that balancing act is critical.

“CFOs are absolutely trying to streamline and free up resources from the transactional element to their finance function in order to fund two new big skill sets that we continue to look for,” Bant said in an interview. Those include professionals with digital skills — especially those related to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence — as well as those with “better analytical storytelling” skills, he said.

Crafting a data-driven story  

CFOs are continuing to confront an ongoing shortage of accounting and finance talent as 2025 unfolds. Eighteen percent of finance chiefs said their ability to attract and retain skilled talent is the biggest challenge to enterprise performance in 2025, Gartner’s survey of 250 CFOs and finance leaders found — coming a close second to the 19% who said their largest concern is slower top line growth.

But as finance chiefs look to find new talent, they’re also confronting a host of macro-economic and geopolitical changes, including new regulations, which are impacting their business models and strategies moving into this new year. The continuing pressure on finance chiefs to both drive growth and cut costs has placed a premium on finding talent with data skills — professionals who are able not just to aggregate and analyze information, but who are able to turn “insights into relevant and actionable stories and recommendations for the enterprise,” Bant said.

“In this environment, as things are moving faster, there's more uncertainty, having that storytelling talent has been a big emphasis for CFOs to set up for success,” Bant said.

CFOs face the multipronged mandate of improving profitability and paring down expenses, while also creating an attractive environment for talent that has the data and technology skills they need, he said. As well as allocating resources to upskill and retain such talent, finance chiefs also need to work closely with their HR departments to make sure they’re tracking the productivity of their staff and moving to “create the capacity to fund new hires and skill sets that are needed across the enterprise,” Bant said.

The AI talent risk

Further complicating the talent challenges faced by finance chiefs is the continued conversation around AI’s place in business processes — a topic where finance chiefs once again find themselves responsible for meeting conflicting goals.

Business leaders are “asking CFOs to think about how to invest ahead of the curve without overspending” on technologies like AI in an era where they are still being asked to improve profitability, Bant said.

“The sentiment is, we have a lot of experiments in the water, and we're starting to hear more and more CFOs coming and asking us how to measure the return on investment before incrementally more dollars are spent,” he said.

That doesn’t mean AI investment is set to slow in the new year, however, but rather that finance chiefs and their fellow C-suite leaders need to be more discerning about where — and on what AI applications — they’re putting their funds.

“Companies that are not funding the right AI initiatives are actually posing a talent risk across their enterprise,” Bant said. The majority of boards are also anticipating their CFO and other C-suite leaders will “create a blended human and AI working model to better support enterprise growth and profitability,” Bant said.

“I think we're going to now be in the era of, let's see a payback before we continue to accelerate the investments further across our budgets in the remainder of the year,” Bant said.