Finance Chiefs Struggle to Extract Value from Tech Investments as Implementation Gap Widens

The finance technology stack has become a graveyard of underutilized software, according to new research highlighting a persistent gap between the promise of financial systems and their actual deployment in corporate finance departments.

The disconnect matters because CFOs are under pressure to demonstrate return on technology investments even as vendors pitch increasingly sophisticated—and expensive—automation tools. The challenge isn't acquiring the technology; it's making it work in practice.

The issue surfaced in a recent analysis by CFO Leadership Council, which examined how finance leaders approach technology adoption. The organization, which represents over 2,500 CFOs and finance executives, found that realizing the opportunities in finance technology requires more than just procurement decisions. The implementation phase—where tools integrate with existing workflows and staff actually use them—remains the critical bottleneck.

"There's this assumption that buying the software solves the problem," said one finance leader familiar with the research. "But you end up with a $200,000 analytics platform that three people know how to use, and everyone else is still exporting to Excel."

The pattern is familiar to anyone who's sat through a software demo. The vendor shows a seamless process: data flows automatically, reports generate themselves, forecasts update in real time. Then reality hits. Legacy systems don't talk to each other. The data needs cleaning. Staff resist changing their processes. Six months later, the finance team is using maybe 30% of the platform's capabilities.

CFO Leadership Council has been tracking this dynamic through its Finance & Accounting Technology Expo and related programming, where finance executives compare notes on what actually works versus what looked good in the pitch deck. The conversations reveal a consistent theme: the technology itself is rarely the problem. The organizational change management is.

The timing is particularly acute as artificial intelligence tools flood the market with promises to automate everything from accounts payable to financial planning. Finance chiefs are being asked to evaluate these tools while still trying to get value from the last generation of software they bought. It's creating a kind of technical debt in the finance function—systems that were supposed to create efficiency but instead require constant maintenance and workarounds.

The research suggests finance leaders need to shift their evaluation criteria. Instead of asking "What can this software do?" the question should be "Can we actually implement this given our current state?" That means honest assessments of data quality, staff capabilities, and organizational readiness—the unglamorous work that doesn't make it into vendor case studies.

For CFOs trying to navigate this landscape, the implication is clear: the bottleneck isn't technology availability. It's execution capacity. Which means the next finance transformation might require less focus on buying new tools and more on actually using the ones already sitting on the server.

The question finance leaders will face in 2026 isn't whether to invest in technology—that decision has already been made. It's whether they can build the organizational muscle to make those investments pay off.