Alignment between finance and IT is becoming a business imperative
Organizations are seeing the strongest results when finance and IT operate with shared priorities and integrated roadmaps rather than parallel agendas. The Summit reflected this cross-functional reality by bringing IT and the office of the CFO together, reinforcing that modernization and digital transformation efforts are not siloed to one function.
The office of the CFO increasingly serves as the insight hub for the business, while IT provides the tooling, data infrastructure and governance needed to connect systems, strengthen decision-making and turn transformation priorities into execution.
AI interest is high, but execution remains uneven
As barriers to AI entry have lowered, many companies have moved beyond experimentation, but are still working through governance, data readiness and use-case prioritization.
The Summit reinforced a practical point for the next phase of adoption: teams need AI literacy first, including how to use the tools, where they add value and what governance is needed before organizations can scale more advanced agentic use cases.
Modernization is not a single initiative — it’s an ongoing program
Leaders are shifting from one-time events or episodic transformations to an ongoing program by adopting continuous improvement models driven by a Transformation Management Office.
This model is becoming more important as the pace of change accelerates. Capabilities that once took organizations two years to develop can now be deployed in weeks, which makes inaction a greater risk than imperfect progress. Over the next 12 months, organizations that have not begun identifying use cases, measuring ROI or building repeatable transformation practices will likely find themselves further behind competitors that are already moving from strategy to execution.
