How CFOs are designing a new finance workforce
After watching talent get scarcer over the past several years, finance and accounting leaders are rethinking the way their teams work.
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Until this year, most CFOs tried to solve the accounting talent shortage by doubling down on hiring strategies that yielded diminishing returns. This year, according to survey data collected from finance and accounting decision makers, the most agile finance leaders have moved on from that approach. Instead, these leaders are redesigning the way their finance and accounting teams work to adapt to longer hiring timelines, expanding workloads, and the CFO’s new role as a key contributor to organization-wide strategy.
The results of
The growing capacity gap in finance and accounting
The finance and accounting talent survey revealed that across industries and organization sizes, there’s now an average of 17 open accounting and finance roles at companies. That’s more than triple the average number of unfilled seats in 2025. As a result of this scarcity, 42% of finance leaders said their organization needs 60 or more days to fill open roles. That long hiring timeline often represents work that’s being postponed or added to other employees’ plates.
The slowdown of new talent entering the pipeline isn’t the only factor in the shortage. Many existing employees are aging out or leaving early. For example, three quarters of U.S. CPAs practicing in 2020
Creating value with a hybrid finance and accounting workforce
After years of survey data indicating that CFOs were hesitant to use AI in accounting and finance workflows, 2026 marks a major shift in their thinking. In 2025, just 23% of survey respondents said their organizations were using AI and automation to address headcount challenges. This year, 63% said they’re using these technologies “to reduce the need to fill roles,” while 26% are using automation and AI for better efficiency without replacing jobs.
More than 90% of leaders surveyed at companies with more than 5,000 employees are now using a combination of AI and automation plus outsourcing to reduce hiring pressure and fill open roles with high-quality talent in regions where it’s more abundant. This hybrid approach that blends traditional hiring, outsourcing, AI and automation represents a new model for filling capacity gaps, and it has the potential to create other kinds of value.
Combining AI and automation for high-volume, highly standardized tasks allows finance leaders to allocate more of their budget to outsourcing to fill open roles and to hiring in-house talent. The ability to outsource as needed also lets leaders scale their finance and accounting teams up or down depending on workload for cost optimization. The survey found that 36% of companies using AI and automation have reduced their finance operating costs by 11 to 20%. One quarter of companies have seen cost reductions of 21 to 30%. At 85% of companies with more than 5,000 employees, leaders reported finance operating cost reductions of more than 30% using automation and AI.
Hybrid workforce benefits go beyond cost savings. When AI handles rote tasks and outsourcing handles accounts payable and similar processes, internal teams can spend more time understanding the organization to identify more opportunities for process improvement and savings. This can help CFOs meet their most pressing priorities, as outlined in a
Building and scaling a hybrid F&A workforce
Creating a hybrid workforce starts with understanding which tasks can be handled by AI and automation and which open roles can be filled with outsourced talent. Define the tasks you want your in-house team to focus on once they’re less overloaded, for your planning purposes and to prevent them from getting anxious as tasks get automated or outsourced.
Next, develop a timeline for your shift so implementation is smooth and resources aren’t wasted. For example, AI and automation might be the most cost-effective place to start, but they may also come with cybersecurity and compliance requirements that add costs and delay deployment. Outsourcing is often the easiest first step because the industry’s processes and guardrails are well-established. As tasks move from your in-house team to AI or outsourced workers, employees may need training for new tasks like acting as the “human in the loop” to review the results of automated processes or analytics to surface insights from operational data.
These steps don’t have to happen concurrently or across the whole organization at once. It’s best to pilot AI and process automation initiatives before scaling them up so you can identify and fix issues while they’re still small. Over time, as you review your hybrid workforce’s KPIs and as AI capabilities expand, you may want to “rebalance” your hybrid model by automating new tasks, outsourcing different roles and investing more in developing talent in house.
Building a hybrid workforce now also builds some advantages that competitors may struggle to match as talent stays scarce and AI capabilities improve. Employees who get to do challenging work and can see a clear connection between their work and company results are more likely to stay engaged and less likely to leave. Companies that start climbing the AI automation learning curve now will be faster to capitalize on new features as more powerful models are released. And leaders who can optimize workforce costs and leverage talent for strategy development provide more value to the organization.
