Between emerging technologies, regulatory requirements, quarterly reporting needs and labor challenges, today’s CFOs have a number of issues keeping them on their toes. Many of these challenges were under discussion during the CFO Leadership Council’s spring leadership conference held in Boston, Massachusetts, last week.

As finance chiefs look to manage their increasingly broad remits, here are four topics that were top of mind for attendees during the two-day conference.

GenAI is here: Now what?  

Generative AI dominated the conversations at the conference. Faced with a dizzying crop of new AI startups and tools vying for their attention — and wallets, finance chiefs seemed to be jostling for a clear look behind the curtain.

CFOs are looking to dig deeper into the technology’s use cases and determine its current capabilities — and more crucially, its limitations — before fully integrating it. A recent IBM study found that as many as 50% of finance organizations have not begun their GenAI journey, with just one out of 10 having optimized traditional AI, Monica Proothi, partner, global finance transformation lead for technology firm IBM said during a keynote speech on Thursday.

Only about 2% of finance organizations have truly begun their GenAI journey, Proothi said, citing IBM data — most finance leaders are still in the process of considering use cases.

“Usually the questions I typically get asked, when I meet with clients, [are], ‘where can I find the biggest value, ROI?’” she said of how leaders are thinking about the technology. “‘Where do I get started quickly? How do I scale? How do I fund this?’’

As well as ROI, finance leaders are also concerned about how to best structure their AI strategies, cybersecurity, and a lack of available training to hone their skills. During a Q&A session following Proothi’s keynote, one CFO expressed frustration about the lack of such classes, while another asked how midsize companies — without IBM’s breadth of resources — could best approach the technology.

Still, in the face of headwinds such as inflation and expanding regulatory requirements, “tailwinds are coming in the form of technologies, specifically, AI, generative AI, which can actually help enable productivity,” Proothi said during her keynote.

Have a succession plan

CFOs were also preoccupied with questions about how to manage a changing workforce. Talent was on CFOs’ minds throughout the two-day conference, with leaders highlighting the importance of skilled financial talent in their organizations.

Restaurant payments platform Toast CFO Elena Gomez, for example, pointed to the strategic importance of building a team for the company’s future as Toast went through its initial public offering, CFO Dive previously reported.

“Probably the most important thing I did is really figure out what talent I had, and what talent we needed for the next…three to five years,” Gomez said Wednesday.

It’s also critical to invest in the professional growth of one’s team and to nurture top talent, other leaders advised. Wetteny Joseph, CFO and EVP for Zoetis Inc, is “always thinking about succession, he said during a Thursday presentation. With the animal health company at its current size, it’s important to have someone on his team that could potentially step into the top finance role if needed, he said.

Securing a remote workforce

Business leaders also have to find ways to manage a workforce that’s scattered across the globe — and crucially, to do so securely, Mark Ostrowski, head of engineering for Check Point software solutions said during a Thursday keynote.

While the makeup of many companies’ workforces has changed, “what I'm finding is most organizations aren't changing the way they prevent attacks with the new landscape that’s out there,” he said.

Today’s cybercriminals are utilizing new schemes and technologies to take advantage of remote workers. Fraudsters have moved away from simpler phishing scams where they hope employees click on a link to tactics such as credential harvesting, Ostrowski said, where fraudsters can mine a user’s information to fraudulently pose as them and gain access to the system.

Technologies like AI have only made such attacks harder to see through: in May, for example, scammers made off with $25 million after using AI deepfake technology to pose as the affected company’s CFO, CFO Dive previously reported. Furthermore, the platforms many remote employees use — connected services like Microsoft’s OneDrive, for example, which can feed into numerous other solutions tapped by a business — give today’s fraudsters more points of entry into companies’ systems.

In such an environment, “to provide a better workplace security program, you have to think about beyond just obvious-looking malicious links,” Ostrowski said. “We actually have to begin with the platforms that we're using.”

Becoming a data-driven partner  

It’s also important for finance chiefs to understand how new technologies and business needs are shifting their own historic role, conference speakers advised. The CFO position has been slowly morphing beyond its traditional, numbers-only remit, with finance chiefs becoming a strategic partner to the CEO — making strong, trusted relationships essential, finance chiefs agreed.

“With the amount of pressure that's on the CEO, if they don't have trust in that relationship with their CFO, that's a really difficult thing,” Kate Jaspon, CFO of Inspire Brands — the parent company of Dunkin’ Brands, Buffalo Wild Wings and Jimmy John’s, among others — said Wednesday during a keynote presentation.

Of course, finance chiefs and CEOs are unlikely to agree on everything, every time, but having that disagreement can actually be healthy for an organization as it creates the opportunity to consider different perspectives, restaurant payments platform Gomez said. When such disagreements arise, it’s important for C-suite leaders to find common ground on what exactly they’re looking to achieve.

“Besides making sure you align on the problem set that you're trying to solve, I think the other piece is, if you really are in that situation where there's lack of alignment, you bring data and clarity to the problem,” Gomez said Wednesday of how finance chiefs need to approach key relationships in the C-suite and with their teams.