Who trains tomorrow's CFO?
Think about how many senior finance leaders learned their professions, reconciliations, invoices, month-end, variance analysis, management accounts, budgeting, review.
Lots of it wasn't glamorous.
Increasingly, AI can perform or accelerate exactly this type of work and that is simply progress. But there's a second-order consequence worth discussing which is the task we're automating may also have been the training exercise.
PwC finds AI-exposed entry-level roles are already significantly more likely to demand skills traditionally associated with seniority, including judgement and leadership. So with this in mind, we may soon expect a 24-year-old to exercise judgement that previous generations developed through years of work we've now automated. That is truly solvable, but only if employers recognise it.
Perhaps tomorrow's finance apprenticeship needs to be deliberately redesigned around AI supervision, Commercial exposure, Decision-making, Scenario analysis, Stakeholder management, Ethics and Critical thinking.
Technology shouldn't stop us developing tomorrow's CFOs, but we may need a completely different way of developing them!
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