If you’re an FD, CFO or senior finance leader, your job has never just been about the numbers. But right now, the edges of the role are expanding fast.
AI is changing how work gets done. Cyber criminals are changing how businesses get attacked. Employees increasingly expect to work across borders. And all of it is happening against a UK economic backdrop where productivity, taxation, costs and growth are under the microscope.
These were some of the big conversations at our recent FDs & F-Words events, where finance leaders came together to tackle Finance, Foresight and Future-Proofing.
Here are 10 questions Finance Directors and CFOs should be asking right now to understand where their businesses really stand, expose the gaps, and prepare for what’s next.
AI IN FINANCE
Can I prove what AI is doing for our P&L?
There’s a big difference between using AI and getting value from AI.
Businesses are adopting the technology quickly. 35% of UK businesses now use AI, up from 12% in 2023 (Source: ONS, Artificial Intelligence in UK businesses, July 2026).
An impressive collection of licences, pilots and shiny new tools doesn’t necessarily add up to better performance, however, and 95% of enterprise AI pilots show no measurable P&L impact (Source: MIT NANDA, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business, 2025).
For finance leaders, the question should be bluntly commercial: where is the value?
Pick specific use cases and attach numbers to them. In credit control, that might be debtor days. In procurement, savings realised. In forecasting, forecast error. In month-end reporting, days taken to close.
Baseline the number before you introduce more AI. Measure it afterwards. Otherwise, you haven’t got ROI. You’ve got a hunch. And a potentially expensive one at that.
Are we using AI to fix good processes, or accelerate bad ones?
There’s a temptation to automate whatever takes the longest, but that’s the wrong starting point.
If a process is messy, inconsistent or held together by spreadsheets and institutional memory, throwing AI at it can achieve little more than making the mess move faster. As Saloni Thanki, Director of AI Transformation at CP put it: AI doesn’t fix a workaround. It runs it faster and hides it better.
Before automating a process, make sure you can explain how it work/people/saloni-thanki/s, who owns it, where the judgement sits and what happens when something goes wrong.
And before buying something new, look at the technology you already pay for. Increasingly, finance platforms already contain functionality for reconciliation, invoice capture, anomaly detection and forecasting.
Want a reality check? Cooper Parry Digital’s AI Reality Check helps you benchmark where you are today and pinpoint where AI could make the biggest difference.
Which decisions should we never hand over to AI?
Agentic AI means systems are increasingly acting, rather than just answering. That creates enormous potential, but it also makes ownership and governance much more important.
More routine workplace decisions will become autonomous over the coming years, while many agent projects are also expected to fail because of cost, unclear value or weak controls.
Every finance leader should be asking:
- Who owns each AI system or agent?
- What data can it access?
- Which decisions need human approval?
- Who checks its output?
- How do we switch it off?
27% of firms reviewing AI output check a fifth or less of it before it is used (Source: McKinsey, 2025).
So, treat an AI agent like a new employee. Give it access, sure, but supervise it and don’t let it approve anything big when it’s not ready.
CYBER SECURITY AND FRAUD
Do our controls work, or do we just know they exist?
There is a dangerous comfort in seeing a control written down.
Policy: tick. Approval process: tick. Segregation of duties: tick.
But what happens at 5pm on a Friday, when month-end is looming and an apparently urgent payment request lands in someone’s inbox?
At FDs & F-Words, cyber and fraud were deliberately treated as two sides of the same problem. One examines how attackers get inside the business. The other examines whether the financial controls stop them once they’re there.
A well-designed control that hasn’t been tested under realistic conditions is an assumption, not assurance.
Don’t assume. Test controls – independently. Challenge them. Run scenarios. Find out where people make exceptions when they’re busy. Fraudsters won’t attack your controls on their best day.
If someone successfully impersonated our CEO or CFO, what would happen next?
Deepfake audio, video and sophisticated phishing attempts are making impersonation attacks more believable.
Lisa Dargan, CEO of URM Consulting Services, Cooper Parry Digital’s cyber division mentioned the high-profile fraud involving engineering firm Arup, where deepfake technology was used during a video call and around £20 million was transferred through 15 fraudulent transactions.
But it doesn’t only happen to large businesses. Size doesn’t matter. Opportunity does. And finance teams are usually the #1 targets because you can move the money.
So, assume an attacker can produce a convincing email, voice message or video. What independent verification happens next?
Lucy Brew, Internal Audit Partner at CP emphasised the importance of training your people, owning testing your controls, and creating a culture where challenging a senior leader’s request isn’t seen as being difficult. Crucially, have an incident response plan ready before you need one.
Want some expert guidance? Cooper Parry Digital’s Cyber & Information Security support can pressure-test your cyber resilience and help you build tighter controls. Cooper Parry’s approach to Risk & Resilience can help you understand your risks, test and challenge your wider business controls.
GLOBAL MOBILITY & INTERNATIONAL REMOTE WORKING
Do we know where our people are working?
Their contract says they work in this location, but where are they sitting, laptop open, doing the job today?
International remote working can develop almost invisibly. Someone extends a holiday. A valuable employee asks to spend a few weeks with family overseas. A new hire wants to work from another country. Individually, those requests can feel perfectly reasonable.
For your business, however, they can create questions around immigration, income tax, social security, corporate tax, data security and employment obligations.
Flexibility can help businesses attract, engage and retain brilliant people. So, as Laura Burton, Global Mobility Partner at CP reminded us, the answer isn’t to ban it, but you need total visibility first, because you can’t manage a risk you don’t know exists.
Do we have a process for overseas requests?
International remote working works best when employees know what they need to declare, managers know what they can approve and HR, Finance, Tax and IT know when they need to get involved.
That means creating:
- A clear policy
- A simple approval process
- Visibility over where people are working
- Clear ownership across relevant teams
- Consistent decision-making.
The goal is a ‘controlled yes’, where the risk allows it, rather than either “work anywhere” or “absolutely not”.
Geography is hugely influential here too. Two superficially identical requests can create very different tax, immigration, social security or permanent establishment considerations depending on the country and circumstances involved.
If international remote working is becoming a regular conversation in your business, our Global Mobility team can help you put the right structure around it.
ECONOMY, PRODUCTIVITY AND GROWTH
Are we still waiting for the cost of doing business to come back down?
The economic pressures facing UK businesses look structural rather than temporary.
A combination of a record tax burden, higher borrowing costs and particularly expensive energy were all mentioned at FDs & F-Words, with UK business electricity prices around 2.4 times the US commercial average.
If your business plan relies on tax, energy, finance or other major input costs becoming more favourable, how robust is it?
Instead of waiting for the environment to improve, focus on what you can control: pricing, margins, procurement, financing, capital allocation and productivity.
Are we investing enough in the things that will make us more productive?
UK productivity has flatlined over much of the past two decades, prompted by weak capital investment and an innovation gap.
Finance leaders must make the distinction between cutting costs and improving productivity.
One protects this year’s margin. The other changes what the business is capable of delivering next year and beyond.
That could mean investing in AI and automation. Better data. New systems. Skills. Processes. Or freeing good people from low-value work so they can spend more time making better decisions.
At FDs & F-Words, we heard about a “Great Race”: whether we can capture the productivity benefits of AI quickly enough to offset some of the negative effects of an ageing population and statism in the UK.
That race is happening inside individual businesses too, so your role as a finance leader is to make sure you’re investing in the right things.
FUTURE-PROOFING THE FINANCE FUNCTION
If we built our finance function from scratch today, would we build the same one?
Would month-end work the same way?
Would your team spend their time on the same tasks?
Would you collect the same data?
Would you buy the same technology?
Would the FD or CFO’s role look the same?
Probably not.
And that gap between the finance function you have and the one you would build today is where your transformation priorities are hiding.
So, take these 10 questions back to your business and your leadership team. If the answers come easily, brilliant.
If a few make the room go quiet? Start there.
And if you need any support on that journey, the Cooper Parry team is here to help.
