Inside the conversations defining CFO priorities in 2026

At KyribaLive last week, I heard a version of the same question again and again from CFOs, treasurers, and finance leaders:

How do we move faster without losing control?

It came up in sessions, but even more often in the candid exchanges that happened when participants are not speaking from a script, but from the reality of what they are being asked to manage every day.

Finance leaders are carrying a difficult paradox right now. They have more data, more technology, and more board-level attention than ever before. At the same time, the pressure to act responsibly, quickly, and confidently has never felt more intense.

AI adoption is accelerating from the top down. Real-time payments are changing the expectations of global commerce. Geopolitical volatility has made liquidity forecasting feel less like a planning exercise and more like a daily act of risk management. CFOs are being asked to move faster and operate more strategically, while maintaining the kind of control that leaves very little room for error.

What struck me at KyribaLive was not that these challenges exist. It was how openly finance leaders are now talking about them, and how much they are learning from one another as they navigate what comes next.

Three themes in particular stayed with me, each one pointing to something important about where the future of finance is headed.

AI is forcing leaders to rethink what they are here to do

Accountability emerged as the first pressing theme. Not as an abstract principle, but as a specific, operational challenge.

As AI moves from experimentation into real finance workflows, leaders are no longer just asking, “What can AI do?” They are asking, “What should AI do, what should people continue to own, and how do we make decisions we can stand behind?”

That distinction matters. Finance leaders cannot be asked to trust a black box, especially when they are accountable for the outcome. The leaders I spoke with are not trying to remove human judgment from the process. They are trying to elevate it, making it faster, better informed, and more defensible.

My conversation with Zack Kass, former Head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI, helped bring this into sharper focus. One of the fundamental questions he raised was not simply whether AI will change our jobs. It was something more personal and more urgent:

What do I want to be known for when AI can do parts of my job?

That question stayed with me because it shifts the conversation from fear to leadership. If AI can summarize, analyze, draft, forecast, and automate more of the work we once considered core to our value, then leaders have to rethink where their value truly comes from.

In finance, that answer is not just technical expertise. It is judgment. It is governance. It is the ability to ask better questions, make responsible decisions, and create trust in moments of uncertainty.

This is the leadership challenge of the AI era. Not simply adopting new tools, but reframing what it means to lead when intelligence becomes more accessible, more embedded, and more automated. The finance leaders who will thrive are not the ones who outsource accountability to AI. They are the ones who use AI to become more thoughtful, more decisive, and more trusted.

Zack (left) and I onstage at KyribaLive.

Why liquidity visibility has become a CFO priority

Liquidity as strategy also emerged repeatedly. Specifically, a fundamental shift in how and where it’s being talked about.

For years, cash visibility was framed as an operational problem resulting from data that couldn’t be trusted and systems that couldn’t keep up. But as treasury leaders are being pulled into more strategic decision-making, the question they’re being asked is no longer just "where is our cash?" It's "are we capitalizing on our liquidity position, or is it holding us back?"

That question changes the role of visibility. It is no longer enough to report on liquidity after the fact. Organizations need to understand it in real time, connect it to decisions, and use it to act with more confidence.

This is why liquidity performance has stopped being only a treasury metric and started becoming a boardroom conversation.

The broader profession is recognizing this shift too. When AFP — the standard-setting body for treasury and finance professionals — co-creates the first-ever stablecoins and on-chain liquidity in treasury certificate with the Kyriba team, it signals that the boundary between treasury practice and treasury technology has blurred in ways that can no longer be ignored.

The Kyriba team with our AFP friends, Pat and Melissa

The pace is equally striking at the infrastructure level. Stablecoin-based payments and real-time settlement rails are reshaping what treasury teams are being asked to manage.

The announcement of a direct integration and agentic orchestration of stablecoins between Kyriba and Circle last week is one indicator of how quickly the liquidity landscape is evolving.

Stablecoin-based payments are no longer just a future consideration for treasury teams. The organizations still treating them as one may find themselves moving too slowly.

Felix Grevy and I with the Circle team (from L-R: Mike, me, Nikhil, and Felix)

The speed vs. control tension finance leaders are still navigating

Underneath both of these themes ran a third that has no easy answer: the tension between speed versus control.

Boards want decisions in hours. Auditors want documentation. Markets want agility. But this mandate to move faster has arrived before the infrastructure to do it safely.

Technology can help, but it cannot answer the leadership question underneath it: how do you move quickly while still preserving trust, accountability, and control?

What I found most compelling was that the best leaders are not treating speed and control as opposing forces. They are using real-time visibility to understand where they can move faster, where they need to hold firm, and where more governance is required before action is taken.

Speed and visibility. Innovation and accountability. Technology and human judgment.

Not as competing values, but as a single, integrated operating model.

Leading with trust

Looking back, what struck me most was the consistency of these themes across organizations of very different sizes, industries, and geographies: AI accountability, strategic liquidity, and the balance between speed and control.

The pressures are universal.

The finance function is in a genuinely consequential moment. The leaders defining it aren't waiting for certainty. They’re not choosing between speed and control. They're building the foundations that make both possible simultaneously, knowing that trust is earned through transparency and authority comes through governance.

That’s what it means to be Trusted to Transform.

The finance leaders who understand this principle are already ahead. And the distance between them and everyone else is becoming harder to close.