#294 The Skills Every CFO Will Need by 2030 Myles Corson EY Global Financial Accounting Advisory Services, Strategy and Markets Leader

Speaker A: Over 60% of CFOs that they want to be leading on the value creation agenda. Only 25, roughly 1 in 4 are actually involved in leading how decisions get made.

Speaker B: Why is it that only one in four are getting involved in this way?

Speaker A: Sometimes perception, this perception of finance as being the people that are just there to keep score and to say no rather than being seen to be proactive in supporting decision making.

Speaker B: In a world of AI, it's still people.

Speaker A: The most important thing, 100% people over index on the technology. They assume technology is going to solve the problems.

Speaker B: Grow CFO is where finance leaders grow together. Join thousands of like minded professionals using Grow CFO to access the combined knowledge and experience of the finance leader community. You can join us today. Growcfo.net hello and welcome to the Grow CFO Show. I'm your host Kevin Appleby and uh, today I've got with me M Miles Courson who is a member of the E and Y global leadership team. Now EMY M have produced a very interesting survey and report looking at the reality of what being a CFO is about versus the perception of what CFOs would like to be. And I think it's going to be a really interesting chat today, delving into the report, finding out some of the facts and seeing what we can learn from it. But Miles, welcome to the Grow CFO Show.

Speaker A: Kevin. Thank you. I uh, appreciate you having me on.

Speaker B: Miles, tell us a little bit about you.

Speaker A: Well, that's very open ended question but as you mentioned, I'm a partner with EY, have been with the firm for over 30 years in various roles. I currently help lead our uh, business that's focused on supporting CFOs and finance leaders. So bringing all of the great experience and capabilities we have across EY and hopefully helping CFOs to be more successful. So as part of that role, as you mentioned, I've been leading our research uh, on the DNA of the CFO for over 15 years. So it's a piece of research that we've done for an extended period which has given us, I think some really good insights as how the role has evolved over an extended period of time. More recently we've kind of extended the research to say, well look, if CFOs are stepping up and having to take on new expanded roles, what does that mean for their teams? So we've done sister pieces of research around the role of the controller and the role of the treasurer, which again are interesting as you see the way leadership teams are coming Together and having to operate in different ways. I also host my own podcast, the EY Better Finance CFO Insights podcast, where, like you, I get the opportunity to have hopefully great conversations with CFOs, technology leaders around the future of finance and what it means for leaders of today and tomorrow. So hopefully that's a little bit of context in your mind.

Speaker B: I love being a podcast host. Don't know about you, but it just gives you the excuse to have a conversation with anybody you feel like having a conversation with and learning so much in the process.

Speaker A: Absolutely, Kevin. Uh, and look, I'm naturally curious about where the future of finance is going. And as you say, the opportunity to speak to your amazing thought leaders on those topics, to ask the questions that I have, which hopefully are reflective of what the audience is thinking about and concerned about, is just a wonderful opportunity. So I'm very appreciative of the opportunity to do that. We started our, uh, podcast about eight, uh, years ago when podcasting was very nascent and very new. And I think for me, the real opportunity was to hopefully provide something in a different format than was usual at the time, where everyone was producing written content, which is still important. But also we knew that the audience we were trying to touch were busy. And when they were sitting, uh, in front of the screen, they were going to be focused on their day job. And we needed to capture those moments when they were on a treadmill or on the commute or in an airport or on a plane where we could hopefully provide 20 or 30 minutes of insight and ideas to help them be more successful and effective.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I still think it's a great media, and I've been podcasting slightly longer than you. The Grosse Fo show is only five years old, but the next hundred days that I do with a marketing friend of mine, I think we started ten and a half years ago.

Speaker A: You were definitely at the front end at that stage.

Speaker B: Yeah, but Miles, you're clearly British. You're sitting in New York at the moment as part of E&Y's global leadership team. How did you get to be where you are today?

Speaker A: It's a long journey. I'll try and give you the short history. So, uh, I started with EY out of college in the mid-90s, so I started in audit many, too. Spent my first three years in London getting my chartered accounting qualification. I say to many people, I really didn't enjoy my first three years in audit. It was not my favorite time. I don't think that's unusual, but I think with many things, hindsight is an amazing thing and I now look back and actually I'm much more appreciative of the founding, the foundation and the grounding that experience provided. But I took an opportunity to go out onto Convent to a client was responsible for the finance department of an export division of a big consumer products company which was fantastic. And I loved the opportunity to get the experience of management reporting and management accounting at the same time. It actually made me realize I didn't want to be a management accountant. So I was able to go back to ey. Uh, I grew up with a very sort of international background and so the sort of the travel and the global reach had always been something I was very comfortable with. So I managed to get onto a project doing software development that ultimately led me to spending time in Moscow and Jakarta in the late 90s doing debt reconstruction work for the Russian and Indonesian governments as part of the IMF refinancing. So I spent a bunch of time in emerging markets doing some really interesting work, came back to the UK and amongst other things was involved in doing one of the biggest.com IPOs in the late 90s which was a fantastic experience. It was a dual listing, US, UK. So really got interested in technology and the.com space and at that stage in my career was thinking what's next? Had a conversation with my father and he said look, you haven't spent any time in the US and particularly if you're part of a Big four organization, it's really important that you get the US experience. Which led me to put my hand up and say look, I'd really like to do something in the us. Thinking that I'd go on to comment within ey, I ended up actually taking a role working for the British Foreign Office in San Francisco as doing trade and investment work. So basically working with technology companies that were looking to expand into Europe and obviously promoting the UK as a base to do that, which was fantastic. That gave me a very different perspective on business development, relationship building, exposure to a number of very senior people in the Valley and also but in government. So it was a very different experience what I would have been doing as a manager slash senior manager within a big four accounting firm. So I came back to the uk, actually went back into audit and worked with one of the big industrial conglomerates that was going through a major restructuring and refinancing during that sort of noughties period. So I had a fantastic experience working with that organization. 2008, 2009, I was doing a lot of work around IFRS in the US so as you may remember, IFRS was. And convergence of US GAAP and IFRS was a big topic at that time. So we were working with a number of large US Corporates that were evaluating what IFRS conversion might look like. So, having been traveling backwards and forwards to the US was asked to move over here. In 2009, we launched the Business Financial Accounting Advisory business at that stage, which we've grown very significantly. But that was really in response to the fact that with the financial crisis, the demand for IFRs evaporated, but it created new opportunity for us and so being responsible for growing that business and moved into global leadership roles. And more recently, as I said, the overall responsibility for the EY finance practice serving CFOs and senior finance leaders. So, um, hopefully that gives you a little bit of context. I know it's sort of a lot to cover in a few short minutes.

Speaker B: I think that the thing that strikes me out of that miles is a lot of very varied experience. And, um, I'm finding that's one of the common threads that as I interview successful finance people, mostly CFOs, that they haven't just stayed in one organization and they haven't necessarily stayed within finance all the time. They've moved about and they've got a lot of wide and varied experience and they're bringing experience often from a different department or a different industry or a different country into their next role.

Speaker A: I think that's right. And as I mentioned, I think for me curiosity has always been a theme. I'm just genuinely interested in business and people and that's led me down exploring some paths. The other thing I would also say I've been lucky to have very good mentors and leaders I've worked with and actively position myself to work with, which I think is important. It's identifying who are the right people that can support your development. But it's also, I think, having the humility to say sometimes people know better what is the right thing for you than you do yourself, because they have more experience, more perspective. So there are certain things that I've taken on in my course of career because people suggested it was the right thing to do rather than it was something I necessarily wanted to do or thought was the right thing to do. So I think the willingness to take the advice and take a chance and take some risks I think is important. And I've always been someone that wanted to say yes and take on an opportunity rather than be negative and say no. I'd rather stay where I am and be in the comfort zone.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I think that mentoring thing is really important. It's why it's a big part of our business here at Grow CFO offering mentoring to new CFOs. And as you say the things that you're good at, you're often the last person to see. You need somebody to point them out to you.

Speaker A: Well, it's interesting at that point, Kevin, about the service you provide and that the networking and the mentoring I think is so important right now. Particularly because one of the other things I do is chair of facilitator Fortune 100 and Fortune 250 chief accounting officer and controller networks. I think now more than ever with the pace of change, the ability to come together with peers and do some of that benchmarking and knowledge sharing and actually say, look, where do I sit relative to peers? Am I doing the right things? Am I doing the same things my peers? Where can I learn is such an important thing. Right. Because again, you think about the role of senior finance leaders, it can sometimes be quite a lonely experience within the organization. You have huge responsibilities. You don't necessarily have people you can turn to. So whether it's mentors within the organization, outside the organization, whether it's networks, I think to be successful you have to have that, uh, network around you.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's one of the reasons when we're running a, uh, CFO program, we run it in small cohorts of about a dozen people. The idea that over the course of the year that you're in the program, you get to know the rest of your cohort and effectively you form this networking group that you hopefully know like and trust and you can talk about your problems in this lonely place you get to as a finance leader.

Speaker A: We have a program that we run with Columbia for next gen CFOs. And you're right, I mean over the course of that program for a year, the relationships and the connections that get established are fantastic to watch. And I think the experience there is going to last a lifetime, working lifetime for many of the participants.

Speaker B: I must admit, when I look back at various programs that I've joined personally, you remember very little about the learning there, but you certainly remember the people and the connections you made. I think it's very powerful. That's my main reason of joining a program would be who am I going to meet? Is this going to be interesting? Yeah. But, uh, Miles Dno, DNA of a cfo, what have you discovered this time around?

Speaker A: There's some really Fantastic insights. And again just to provide a little bit of context for the listeners. Right. So as I mentioned this is a survey that we've been doing for over 15 years. So we survey over 1500 CFOs and senior finance leaders globally. So it's across over 25 countries, 22 sectors. So I think provides a really interesting perspective of the state of the CFO role right now. Our uh, target audience is organizations with revenue over a billion dollars. Give you also a sense of, sense of scope. These are large companies, but again some of your members and listeners may be on a smaller scale, but I think there are still things that are applicable in terms of the lessons.

Speaker B: I'm looking at some of the findings Miles, and I'm thinking, yeah, that's the same sort of thing that we find if we're dealing with cfo, uh, in a scale up CFO in a mid market company. There's a lot of commonality. Yeah.

Speaker A: So hopefully some of the insights are relevant. But I think the key finding I think is unsurprisingly the expectation of over 60% of CFOs do they want to be leading on the value creation. And I think right now with everything we're experiencing in terms of the disruption pace of change, I think CFOs are very uniquely positioned to be leading enterprise transformation. What is more concerning is that there is a gap between that uh, sort of ambition that's expressed in the research and the practical experience day to day where only 25, roughly 1 in 4 are actually really involved in leading how decisions get made, how value metrics are measured as part of the day to day organization. So there is clearly a gap between the ambition and the reality.

Speaker B: Surprises me a little bit Miles, that the gap is as big as that. And certainly as we talk to new CFOs, CFOs in their first appointment, once you get past number one, number two, biggest things which are always lack of confidence and imposter syndrome. Number three coming up tends to be, I don't feel I'm sufficiently involved in strategy and you can kind of feel why that might be in the first time CFO role. They're not perceived by the rest of the leadership team to have the necessarily the depth of experience. But you would have thought by the time you get to be a CFO of the sort of companies you're surveying, you have got that huge depth of experience. So why is it that only one in four are getting involved in this way?

Speaker A: And I think some of it is the sort of a, uh, brand versus reality perspective. So again, there's an interesting statistic that 27% of the CFO survey says that only 7% say the business identifies them as being a strategic partner. And I think that in terms of the perception of finance versus how finance perceives itself, I think again is very different. Finance leaders would perceive themselves as being more strategic. So I think that the challenge is sometimes perception and how finance shows up in cross functional conversations and collaboration. And I think there is still this perception of finance as being the people that are just there to keep score and to say no when people want investment, rather than being seen to be proactive in supporting decision making, actually articulating how they can support business in value creation. In the white paper you mentioned alongside the statistical survey, we interview a number of CFOs to put more color commentary on the research and the findings. We interviewed the secret CFO. I don't know if you've read in the secret CFO's stuff. So we interviewed him and he had some great observations, one of which was finance isn't ever really going to lead value creation. That's the responsibility of the commercial functions and the business. But as an enabler of value creation, it has a really important role to play. And I think one of the other really telling statistics was just this idea that 68%, so almost 7 out of 10 CFOs are saying that they urgently need to reevaluate enterprise value metrics. If anybody was positioned to really be able to help the organization articulate how value has been created, it should be finance people. And yet what we're hearing is finance people are struggling with that. And I think I had in the podcast was Rory Sutherland, the vice chair at Ogilvy, who's uh, big in behavioral economics and behavioral science. And he was fantastic. And we had some really good conversations around how finance and marketing can come together. But one of the comments he made was around the fact that finance people like certainty. They're uncomfortable with grayness. There was a great quote that a missed opportunity isn't measured on a balance sheet. And I think right now this idea of uncertainty and how you actually measure what is unknown, where there aren't clearly defined returns, but we can all measure the investment and the cost side of the equation, but where the return is uncertain, it's much more difficult. And again, as finance people, we like the analysis, we like the black and white. We're less comfortable with the uh, qualitative and how that gets measured. And that I think is one of the big opportunities for really effective CFOs is to be able to navigate that grayness, to bring a combination of financial and non financial perspectives and really articulate how the business is progressing against what it stated, what it has stated to be as its strategic priorities.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, of course the problem, Miles, is that we weren't taught to do any of that stuff to pass our exams, were we?

Speaker A: Having done the, I said, as I said I did the Chartered Accounts exams in the UK and then had to do the CPA exams in the US when I moved across. I've seen it both sides. But yeah, I think the exams give you a solid foundation, a solid grounding and experience. But nothing beats the practical experience of being out in the business and um, face to face and nothing, if you're a finance person, it's just sitting in the ivory tower, sitting within the safety of your function. If you're not getting out, seeing what the commercial business is actually doing, understanding supply chain, if you're not sitting in some customer meetings and actually seeing what the salesforce is experiencing firsthand, I think you're missing an opportunity to really be effective.

Speaker B: Do you think on the career journey the CFO having spent some time outside of finance in sales or marketing, would be a useful thing to have done?

Speaker A: There's a lot of data out there. The recruitment firms obviously look at a lot of data on the profile of CFOs and I think there's a very clear trend, the broader experience now of uh, people coming into the CFO or the traditional finance role of promotion is changing. I think you see more people with operational background, more people with strategy background. And I think that's because the expectations are so much broader. You can cover the compliance and the technical aspects of the role through strong team of controllership, tax, FP&A. But I think at a minimum you need to have been out in the business with an operational CFO role, perhaps a supply chain finance role. That kind of passport and the stamps you have in the passport I think are really important and particularly M, if you have traditional finance background, you need to be thinking about what other experiences do I need to add? If you have an aspiration to be a CFO and think very proactively about how you get those opportunities.

Speaker B: Comes back to the comment that I made about your career when we talk through it, Miles. Varied. Lots of different industries, lots of different countries and I think I would counsel the wannabe CFO to get as much varied experience on your CV as you possibly can.

Speaker A: That's right. And I think it comes Back to change is continuous and 80%, four out of five, the CFOs we surveyed in this research expect fundamental shifts in business models from AI. They expect continuing geopolitical uncertainty. Change is the norm. So you have to be comfortable operating in a changed environment. And one of the best ways to do that is put yourself in situations where you have to get out of your comfort zone, get different experiences because you learn most when you're in that new environment taking on new things and new challenges. And as a result you have more comfort as you build the muscle memory of doing them.

Speaker B: Now. Quite incredible these days. We've managed to get 20 minutes into the conversation before that wonderful new two letter word AI came into play. Now I'm guessing that the survey must have covered something about AI Miles.

Speaker A: Yep. You would not be surprised to hear that we looked at that as obviously you mentioned everybody is talking about it. And I think the survey definitely was consistent with a lot of things that I'm hearing day to day in the conversations I have with finance leaders and the networks that I've mentioned. And I think one of the key statistics is only 20% of the people surveyed identified their organizations as being advanced or leading in the adoption of AI. And frankly that may even be a little bit bullish from what we're experiencing. So for many finance organizations the real challenge is they feel like they're at the back of the line when it comes to investment. So a lot of the investment in AI is really going into commercial, front office, customer facing functions, which is, you know, shouldn't be any surprise. At the same time, going back to the metrics, I think what a lot of organizations are experiencing is actually the payback on AI investment is not at the levels or at the pace they were expecting. This is harder than I think many people experienced. I think we've moved the conversation beyond individual use cases into actually this is more around how do you really reimagine enterprise workflows in a different way? And again, that's where this point about collaboration and cross functional working is really important. And there's slightly worrying data in the survey about the collaboration capabilities of finance. But you've got to be able to build relationships, cross functional boundaries. I think in an AI world, if you're really going to unlock some of the transformative potential of the technology, as you'd expect, there are obviously some reasons why I think organizations are potentially struggling with AI adoption. Data and data bias are uh, number one on the list. But also culture and skill set are a challenge. And again Access to technology. I think some real challenges with adoption. For me, the real question is, what are the outcomes you're trying to drive as a finance leader from the adoption of technology? And it's not technology for technology's sake, it's how is technology enabling an outcome? Is it you want to be a better business partner and you want to free up time from manual work to actually be able to spend more time sitting alongside the commercial functions? That I think is kind of the question you really need to answer. But what we've seen is a continuation of the theme, which is finance continues to struggle to really drive successful transformation. So we did a piece of work a few years ago with Oxford University side business school, where we found that 75% of CFOs had experienced some form of issue with the transformation project, which was a materially worse outcome than general leadership roles, almost by 10%. And again, a lot of that comes down to the human aspects of transformation. Right? And what we saw with this piece of research is only 12% of the survey respondents would say their transformation exceeded expectation, which is pretty poor results when you think about the level of effort, the money, the leadership time spent on driving these transformation programs. But interestingly, for that cohort that was more successful in transformation, there was a clear common characteristic which was they were three times more likely to identify their team as being highly adaptable. It goes back to the conversation we were just having, Kevin, about being comfortable with change, but that adaptability is such a key characteristic. You think as a leader, what do I need to be looking for in my team? Adaptability is one of the key things if you're looking to drive successful transformation outcomes.

Speaker B: And, um, change is a very interesting thing to look at there. I learned so much about managing change being a management consultant that I don't think that I'd ever have picked up if I'd stayed in a straight finance role within a business. And, um, to me, part of the challenge, Miles, is how do you teach the line finance folk all the way up to the CFO how to do finance transformation, which is a whole skill set that again, you aren't taught to do in your exams. You probably have very little exposure as you move through the ranks of an organization in doing transactional finance or moving into FP and A or things like that. Actually, transforming stuff is a whole different skill set.

Speaker A: I couldn't agree more, Kevin. And it's interesting. I do the presentations and I ask groups, how many people are doing a finance transformation? 9 out of 10 hands will go up and the other one's probably not been paying attention to the question because they're on the phone. But everyone will say they are doing some form of transformation, whether that's a big T or a little T, that there is just no organization that isn't going through some transformative event or experience. When I ask the follow up question, I say, okay, so what is it? What are you doing with your finance transformation? The answers tend to be one of two things. We're implementing a new technology or we're looking to take significant cost out the business. So to me those are tools, uh, or they're results of the transformation, but they're not really why you do the transformation again, I think is one of the reasons that the finance leaders struggle. They struggle to bring their teams along with them because they can't articulate what is it that we're going to get to on the other side of this transformation that is actually worthwhile for us as an organization, as an enterprise, because it's helping achieve the strategic objectives is going to be beneficial to us as a finance function because we're going to get to do more interesting work together as a team and what it's going to mean for you as an individual in terms of your career and the potential. So I think being able to articulate that we all know, and you and I, Kevin, have been around a long time, we've seen a lot of transformations, we've seen successful transformations, we've seen poor transformations. But I think the really differentiating characteristic are uh, the ones that there are always going to be tough times during a transformation program. It's never plain sailing, it's never all on time and to budget. Everyone's doing great, but it's how you turn around when you get into those difficult situations. And a lot of that comes down to again because the team believe in the outcomes they're trying to drive towards. So again, long winded way of saying the human aspects of transformation are so important. And so I think underrepresented in many finance leaders agenda and I think one of the key differentiating factors for successful finance leaders is communication and effective communication. It's the storytelling, it's the engagement with folks, it's being able to communicate hard messages, difficult messages in simple terms and with an authenticity and honesty that people engage with and say, yeah, I want to follow this leader on this journey and I want to make it successful. So I think that's really important. The other thing that I think we've seen with the survey is always over 2/3 of the survey respondents identified new skills and leadership styles as being required. And yet when we asked them to prioritize the things that they were most focused on, leadership development only came fifth or sixth in the list of priorities. So again, there's this say, do gap between oh, we know it's important, but actually there's all this other stuff is more important because we can measure that and it's more tangible.

Speaker B: If that's fifth or sixth on the list, what do you find next top of that list?

Speaker A: It comes back to data technology. The tangible stuff is where people tend to prioritize because it's more measurable.

Speaker B: And uh, certainly we're seeing in grow CFO very much a change when we're putting webinars on with partners, things like that. Maybe two years ago, the finance community wanted to learn about a broad range of things right now and uh, I think it's reflected in your survey results. Folk are feeling as though they're not ready for AI. They're behind the curve. And now literally the only way we're going to get a good attendance at anything we put on webinar wise is to make sure it's about AI upfront. Folks seem to be absolutely obsessed with that. One thing at the moment, and certainly one of my observations as well, is during those sessions your expectation is that folk will be further, uh, down the line than they are. They'll be wanting to learn about some fairly sophisticated use cases of agentic AI and data management and so on. Then when the Q and A starts in the session, the questions are much, much basic than that. And folk really aren't where you think they're likely to be at the moment.

Speaker A: I think that's well said, Kevin. And I think that again, as an industry we kind of create these burning platforms and this case for change. And I think boards are obviously asking the questions. Management are getting this from every different direction. But the practical experience is I don't think many organizations are that far advanced. I think that there's no room for complacency. But I think it goes back to the point we made earlier on. Right. Make sure you are benchmarking with peers and with networks because I think many organizations are doing the right things. They're investing in the foundational skill building. They're trying to experiment and explore. But I don't think anybody is really seeing implementation at scale yet. And I think scale is one of the important things. There's lots of interesting, one of uh, our members called science experiments, where you can prove what the technology can do. But does that actually scale up into a material return is a different question. Taking some froth out of the conversation and being honest and transparent about uh, where we actually are on the journey. I think the big cases that I've seen actually aren't in the stuff that's getting all the attention on Gen AI and Agentic is still on machine learning and natural language capabilities. So I think a lot of organizations, particularly if you take pain points in the traditional finance close around AP processing or invoice matching, intercompany matching, these are uh, manual journal entry reconciliations for large organizations, international organizations, these are the kind of things that they spend a lot of time and effort dealing with that aren't really value adding but they consume a lot of time and effort, those kind of opportunities. And then the other thing is seeing Genai as a one tool in the toolbox is important, right? So if you can use JNIA as part of the process to revamp a dashboard or to run some variance analysis, it may be part of the overall solution that you're building. But it's this kind of general, oh, AI is going to solve all of this without really understanding what that means I think is part of the challenge that we're experiencing right now. So uh, again look, I think we're all super bullish on the longer term opportunities, but I think there's going to be some bumpiness and I think the conversation we're having right now is I think we've been through this wave where there wasn't really any cost to AI. The companies were giving away lots of access, lots of tokens because they wanted people to start using. As the real cost of tokens becomes apparent, I think we're going to see a different equation. Is the payback quite as significant as perhaps we first thought? Is there actually a conversation around the technology versus the people? Absolutely, because I think we're only now starting to really understand what the true cost of the current models are. And again, I think part of the conversation is the frontier models that we're using right now, which the AI, uh companies are promoting very significantly, are like the Formula one cars of technology. Whereas what many of us need is the F150, the pickup truck that uh, can do specific things really well and be general utility. So I think we will see evolution in this and we're just part of that natural technology cycle. Again, the message right now would be you need to keep moving, you need to keep experimenting. I think the big opportunities will come through the broader enterprise transformation. I think Even again, looking at it just purely through the lens of functional transformation really potentially undershoots the transformative impact of AI for organizations that uh, frankly finance should be leading in terms of how some of those organizational designs get architected.

Speaker B: Uh, I think from the point of view of being a business partner, getting into the value creation side of the business, actually AI gives you a great research tool. To help with that, go have a conversation with Claude or ChatGPT about the month's results or the trends in the business and ask it about what's going on in the industry and you will get, I think some really great little bits of insight that can be incredible. Start as for 10 in that value add, create value creation conversation with the rest of the business.

Speaker A: I couldn't agree more. I think again, obviously the access to data and insights that it unlocks is fantastic. I definitely use it as a sparring partner in terms of challenging myself on presentations. What are the key messages coming out? What are the tough questions I wouldn't want to get asked by an audience and uh, being prepared to respond to that. And again, I think that's an application that we're certainly seeing with public companies in terms of investor communications. Right. There are definite opportunities there for CFOs as they're preparing for analyst meetings and investor communications.

Speaker B: I interviewed one CFO about how he was using AI and he said he'd set up a GPT that had Personas of all his leadership team and board in there and he used it for just about anything that he was going to go to the leadership team with to try and see if he could gauge their point of view of things before he had to present it. I thought that was a brilliant use.

Speaker A: I think that's exactly the same. I think I've seen the same use case with CFO preparing for analyst presentations and knew the sector analysts and the profile of questions they're likely to ask and was therefore sort of prepared as a result. So yeah, I think that Persona type approach and how you build up that experience is definitely an interesting one.

Speaker B: So Miles, you've been doing the DNA of the CFO survey for a number of years now. You must be seeing trends that are building up. If we were looking maybe 12, 24 months ahead, where are those trends taking us?

Speaker A: The first thing I'd say is there's a lot out there that uh, everyone wants to tell you that the CFO role is transforming and it's going to be completely different. And with the benefit of 15 years plus of experience, I definitely see this as an evolution, there is a longer term trend, but there are clearly variations around that trend. And having done the survey every two or three years, obviously we've been through Covid, we've been through the financial crisis. There are things that obviously change the short term dynamics and focus. And, uh, we sort of talk about this balance between value protection, value optimization and value creation. And during those difficult times, the focus and the balance of time CFO spend will obviously naturally pivot back to the protection and the optimization angles. I think we're definitely at a point now where the creation piece of the equation is definitely getting the most attention. That's where the big trends are. It's interesting, you and I, we were chatting beforehand, Kevin, talking about the things that don't change. I think the common themes of this research over time we've been doing it will remain. The really effective CFOs will continue to be the ones that get the human aspects of the role, right? The ones that are effective communicators and effective collaborators, the ones that are able to have a strategic view on where the business is going and really understand how they can help to drive that strategic agenda. Because again, I think as a finance leader, if you understand what is being communicated externally, are, uh, you able to then make sure that translates into everything the organization is doing? And is everything the organization doing helping to achieve those objectives that ultimately you're representing externally as being how you drive value creation? As an organization, I've been lucky to work with many leading organizations, and I think the ones that really have that clarity of purpose, clarity of vision, you can see internally how everything that they decide is informed by those decisions. And again, it's like the military analogy. You've got to have that overall understanding of the mission objective so that people can make decisions on the fly in the real world. Right? Because not everything operates the way you want it to. I had an executive called Phil Shelley on the podcast and he was ex military, and he talked about the old adage that a strategy doesn't survive first contact with the enemy. It's the Mike Tyson thing. Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the jaw. I think successful finance leaders are the ones that can create an environment where their teams understand what they're trying to do. And we interviewed Tracy Farr, who's relatively recently become the CFO at Lazard for the survey, and there's a good interview with him in the document. The first questions he asked his team coming into the role, and he spoke to a lot of his junior People is do you understand what you're doing day to day is adding value to the enterprise? And very simple question, but actually some really interesting results. And really for some, no one had taken the time to explain why what they were doing was adding value. So even just the simple, well, this is why it matters and this is how it is connecting. It was helpful in a very cheap and easy way to get more engagement and team morale building. But also it identified some things where actually there were some opportunities that things were being done because they'd always been done and no one really had stopped the challenge. And again, I think particularly in the AI world, if there are things that the people on the front end, the front line of your business are aware of, they're probably going to be the ones that really understand the problem and are more likely to actually understand how the technology may be able to solve. So how do you kind of as a leader, uh, overcome some of that frozen middle? Are you getting out and talking to people on the front lines, the junior people that probably understand the issues and understand the technology to help you solve the problem.

Speaker B: So the interesting thing coming over for me there, Miles, is that in a world of AI, it's still people that are the most important thing 100%.

Speaker A: And that was the thesis of the research system. Is it technology or is it people? And it's technology or talent and it's a combination of both. But I will say that again, people over index on the technology. They assume technology is going to solve the problems. But we all know, we've talked through the course of this conversation, that if you don't get the human aspects of transformation right, the technology will not be successful. And again, I think with AI, particularly right now, with all of the media context, for all the negativity, people are nervous and they're resistant because they're concerned about what it means to their jobs. So as leaders, we have to be able to articulate actually there is a really exciting opportunity for us to unlock potential and potential career opportunities. But we have to be prepared to go on the journey and embrace change. And I think this idea that you're just going to free up capacity and people are going to jump into these higher value skills, more commercial facing isn't the reality. Right. We've got to work with our teams to get them comfortable with the change, to provide them with the training and the support to go through the transition. But in the day you've also got to have that culture where people want to embrace the change and go on the journey.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think that's probably a really good place to draw this to a close. Miles Courson, thank you hugely for being this week's guest on the Grow CFO Show.

Speaker A: Kevin, I appreciate it. Thanks very much. I really enjoyed the conversation.