Artificial intelligence is handing finance chiefs powerful new tools — but it can’t clean up a mess built on “sticky notes across someone’s computer,” top executives warned this week.

The real shakeup isn’t that AI can crunch forecasts or scan contracts faster. It’s that finance departments are getting pulled into the boardroom earlier than ever — and are now on the hook to build the guardrails that let companies move fast without blowing something up.

“Finance is finally getting pulled into the room before the decision is getting made, not after,” Workiva CFO Barbara Larson said September 14, 2026, at the company’s Amplify conference in Las Vegas. “Finance is also being asked to lead things like business strategy now, or tech strategy and data strategy.”

That’s a big shift for an industry once seen as the compliance cop of corporate America. Now bosses want finance chiefs deciding which data can be trusted, when a human needs to double-check the robot’s homework — and when an entire process should be scrapped rather than automated.

To dig deeper, visit the original article on the Thomson Reuters blog.