CFOs Pivot From "Historians" to Real-Time Decision Architects as AI Reshapes Finance Function
The chief financial officer's job description is getting a rewrite, and artificial intelligence is holding the pen.
Brian Unruh, CFO at AI services firm ABBYY, says the finance chief's role has fundamentally shifted from retrospective reporting to proactive decision-making, driven by AI tools that deliver real-time visibility into business operations. In a mid-June interview with PYMNTS, Unruh described the transformation bluntly: CFOs are no longer historians documenting decisions after they're made—they're strategic partners shaping those decisions as they happen.
"The CFO role has evolved from being a historian, looking at and delivering dated reports, to becoming a strategic partner in decision-making and not just documenting that decision-making," Unruh told PYMNTS. The shift reflects broader pressures on finance leaders to provide what Unruh calls "a single source of company-wide truth" in an increasingly volatile macroeconomic environment.
The practical implications are showing up in daily finance operations. Unruh says his team now provides "timely, accurate, and multidimensional data" to business units on a daily basis—a cadence that would have been impossible without AI-powered analytics. That real-time data flow, he argues, is what "ultimately helps define and accelerate internal growth drivers" inside organizations.
The technology is changing not just the speed of financial analysis but its predictive power. Unruh points to AI systems that can analyze customer behavior patterns to forecast potential churn, allowing finance teams to flag retention risks before revenue actually walks out the door. Similarly, AI-driven analytics can surface operational bottlenecks in processes like sales enablement and cash collection, creating opportunities to improve cash flow before problems compound.
"Technology, especially AI, has accelerated the success of finance teams by providing real-time access to data and insights," Unruh said. "This allows us to proactively address issues before they become significant problems, rather than just reporting on them after the fact."
The shift also represents a structural change in how companies approach decision-making. Unruh describes the old model as "very siloed, with different departments focusing on their specific metrics." The AI-enabled alternative, he says, is a more holistic approach that examines the entire value chain to understand how different operational areas interact and influence outcomes.
For CFOs navigating this transition, the message is clear: the finance function's mandate now extends well beyond closing the books. Unruh frames it simply—"the finance department exists to fuel decision frameworks." That means finance teams are increasingly expected to deliver not just accurate numbers, but actionable intelligence that can shape strategy across the organization.
The evolution Unruh describes has been "driven by technological advancements, changing market dynamics, and an increasing need for sustainable growth." As generative AI tools and advanced analytics become more sophisticated, the gap between CFOs who can leverage these capabilities and those still operating in historian mode is likely to widen. The question for finance leaders isn't whether AI will reshape their role—it's whether they're building the data infrastructure and analytical capabilities to take advantage of it.
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