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.
The trust gap
Companies are under the gun to prove AI investments are paying off — even though their ability to fact-check the machines hasn’t kept pace.
Workiva Chief Customer Officer Penny Ashley-Lawrence pointed to survey data showing 84% of respondents said they felt at least somewhat confident in AI-generated numbers landing in annual reports without a human ever checking them. Yet more than a quarter — 26% — admitted internal audits had already caught AI screwups that made it all the way to boardrooms or the public.
“In many ways, our confidence in AI is outpacing our ability to verify it,” Ashley-Lawrence said.
Match the scrutiny to the stakes
The fix isn’t hitting the brakes on AI — it’s knowing when to.
“If you have something that’s maybe going to your board or it’s going externally, that is going to need human reviewers, full stop,” Larson said. “It’s really all about how do you match scrutiny to the stakes.”
Low-stakes grunt work? Let the AI rip, Larson said. But anything headed to investors, regulators or the board gets the full human once-over.
Cigna plays it safe
Over at The Cigna Group, CFO Ann Dennison said the health insurance giant is treading carefully given its heavily regulated business. Cigna is spreading its AI bets across three tiers — small experiments for employees, mid-sized fixes to existing workflows, and big-dollar bets on projects that directly help clients and patients.
“I am also not one of the 87% that’s comfortable with Cigna going out just straight from AI,” Dennison said. “We take a very careful approach.”
One example: Cigna’s pharmacy-benefits unit is using AI to comb through contracts stuffed with thousands of terms — speeding up the grunt work without cutting out human review.
Stop blaming the software
Larson had a warning for bosses eager to slap AI on every problem: sometimes the process itself is the problem.
She recalled digging into one workflow only to find it was held together by sticky notes scattered across an employee’s desktop. “AI can’t fix that,” she said.
Her advice: fix the process first, then decide if AI even belongs in it. “Defaulting always to AI is probably not the right answer.”
Garbage in, garbage forever
The panel agreed AI is only as good as the data feeding it — and bad data doesn’t get better with age.
“The numbers are only as good as the data,” Dennison said, adding that Cigna is building what she called a “single source of confidence” so every department is working off the same trusted playbook.
Northwest Bankshares CFO Doug Schosser said data can no longer be treated as purely an IT headache — finance has to be in the room too. But the real accountability, he said, starts at the source.
“Whoever creates the data, they actually own the data,” Schosser said. “You have to put all the controls on the front end, because if it starts off bad, it’s very, very difficult to ever get it correct after that.”
The payoff
Schosser pointed to a contract loaded with 92 amendments — normally days of mind-numbing manual review — that AI helped his team tear through fast, freeing staff to actually talk strategy with business leaders instead of drowning in paperwork.
“That’s a pretty enormous benefit,” he said.
The bottom line from the CFO panel: AI isn’t gunning for finance jobs — it’s rewriting what the job is. And the executives who win will be the ones who make sure the business can actually trust what’s on the screen.
As Ashley-Lawrence summed it up: “Speed is not an advantage if the trust isn’t there. In fact, it’s a liability.”
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