Finance teams have never been busier.
Tighter closes. Longer reporting lists. More dashboards, more meetings, more noise about AI and transformation than most of us can remember.
And yet, if you step back and ask the business how it experiences finance, an uncomfortable truth often appears.
We feel flat out. But they don’t always feel the impact.
That gap is what we call the Business Impact Illusion — the disconnect between how hard finance is working on the inside and how influential it’s perceived to be on the outside. We see effort, complexity and late nights. The business often still sees “the numbers team”: dependable, necessary, but not always central to the biggest decisions.
That illusion sits at the heart of the GENCFO Trends 2026 Report, entitled 'The Business Impact Illusion'.
This isn’t another future-of-finance think piece. It’s built from real conversations, live polling and lived experience from finance leaders who are in the middle of it — not commenting from the sidelines. It captures how CFOs and senior finance leaders actually feel about strategy, technology, AI, people, energy and influence heading into 2026, and where they know things need to change.
What comes through is a profession at a tipping point. On paper, finance has more tools, more data and more access than ever. In reality, the same tensions keep resurfacing: reporting that’s faster but not always more influential, business partnering that’s talked about more than embedded, AI that’s discussed endlessly but scaled cautiously, and teams exhausted by transformation layered on top of BAU.
Trends 2026 sits right in that discomfort. It explores where finance believes it’s making an impact, where the business may be experiencing something different, and what’s actually getting in the way — in the everyday choices about priorities, behaviours and where we spend our time.
This report isn’t about working harder.
It’s about being felt.
Because in 2026, success for finance won’t be measured by how many reports we produce or how many pilots we run.
It will be measured by one question:
Does the business feel our impact?
To find out, make sure you read our Trends Research Report, coming out very soon!
