Sixty Percent Say Yes. Twenty-Five Percent Do.
Here's the number that should bother every CFO reading this: 60% of their peers say they should define and shape enterprise value creation. Only 25% actually lead investment decisions where returns are uncertain, indirect, or long-term.
That 35-point gap isn't a rounding error. It's a structural disconnect between what finance leaders believe their role should be and what they actually do in the room where capital gets allocated.
The EY 2026 Global DNA of the CFO survey makes the pattern hard to argue with: CFOs recognize their role in shaping enterprise value, but the ambition is not consistently reflected in practice — particularly in leading uncertain investment decisions, redefining how value is measured, and embedding transformation across the organization. The research, summarized by EY's Global Financial Accounting Advisory Services leadership in the WSJ CFO Journal, distills the shortfall into five lessons. Each one is less about strategy decks and more about where finance spends its hours, what it chooses to measure, and who it develops next.
Structural Barriers Keep Finance in the Control Chair
The gap between ambition and action isn't a willpower problem. It's an operating-model problem, and the survey data names the culprits.
Only 27% of CFOs say the finance function is widely seen as a strategic partner in value creation. The rest describe a function still perceived primarily as control or operations. Meanwhile, CFOs report that nearly 47% of finance capacity is absorbed by core activities — reporting, compliance, and controls. Roughly half the function's bandwidth is consumed before any insight generation or strategic decision support begins.
That combination creates a vicious cycle: because finance is staffed and measured as a control function, it shows up late to investment conversations; because it shows up late, the business keeps treating it as a checker rather than a partner; and because it's treated as a checker, the operating model designed for control gets reinforced. If finance remains reactive, EY's researchers warn, it risks judging value too late rather than helping shape it early.
The shift: Claim a proactive seat earlier in the decision cycle. CFOs should use their data assets and enterprise-wide visibility to guide decisions precisely where value and confidence across the business are still emerging — not after the business case has hardened into a number that finance can only ratify or reject.
Replace Rethinking Metrics With a New Measurement Framework
Finance cannot rely on conventional ROI calculations alone, and most CFOs know it. More than two-thirds (67%) say they need to reevaluate how enterprise value is measured, and 71% say traditional metrics are not enough to assess initiatives that combine people and technology.
But knowing the yardstick is broken and shipping a new one are different things. The proposed framework integrates traditional financial KPIs with nonfinancial metrics — AI-enabled decision quality, organizational resilience, and customer outcomes. The logic is straightforward: value from AI and technology investments often shows up as better forecasting, stronger pricing decisions, or more effective risk identification. None of those appear on a conventional ROI line item, so if they aren't measured, they get voted down.
The shift: Incorporate qualitative and forward-looking indicators into the review of any initiative where impact is indirect, long-term, or shaped by the interaction of people and technology. A business case that can't be measured with the new framework isn't unmeasurable — it's a signal that the framework has to be built.
Adaptability Is the Transformation Differentiator Nobody Is Staffing For
The most striking contrast in the survey sits in the transformation data. Among CFOs who describe their finance teams as highly adaptable, 42% report transformation outcomes that exceeded expectations. For "generally adaptable" teams, that figure drops to 16%. For teams that adjust only with support, it's 3%. Adaptability correlates with transformation success by better than a factor of thirteen at the extremes.
Yet only 11% of CFOs describe their teams as highly adaptable. And the mismatch compounds: 68% of CFOs say new skills and leadership styles are required for successful transformation, but people and culture leadership ranks only sixth among development priorities. Transformation ultimately depends on whether teams trust new tools, work across boundaries, and feel equipped to adapt, a culture question that most finance development plans never get around to answering.
The shift: Build adaptability deliberately. Reinforce continuous learning as a standing expectation rather than a training event, organize teams to work across functional boundaries by design, and create an environment where people feel safe questioning assumptions, because transformation fails at the point where trust in new tools breaks down, not at the point where the roadmap was drawn.
AI Value Is a Mindset Problem Before It's a Technology Problem
On AI readiness, the survey splits the profession into three camps. A majority, 53%, rate their preparedness to use AI to create enterprise value as only developing, early stage, or limited. Another 27% call themselves "functional": the right data, tools, and people are in place, but the value isn't optimized yet. Only 21% place themselves in the leading or advanced group.
The revealing part is how the leading group thinks differently. Among those advanced CFOs, 71% see strong potential in AI for growth forecasting. Compare that with 44% of CFOs still developing capabilities and 30% of those with limited progress. The capability laggards tend to approach AI defensively, as a tool to manage risk or grind out efficiency, while the leaders treat it as an offensive instrument for growth. Same technology; fundamentally different posture. The gap in perceived potential is 41 points across groups whose tooling gaps are likely far narrower than that.
The shift: Move AI from experimentation to execution by concentrating on high-value use cases where insight improves forecasting, pricing, and market expansion. If the AI portfolio contains only risk and efficiency projects, the constraint is the CFO's framing, not the vendor's product.
The Leadership Bench Beneath the Expanding CFO Role Is Thin
The CFO role keeps absorbing new mandates, technology strategy, AI governance, value creation, but the pipeline under it isn't keeping pace. 36% of CFOs say their finance leadership teams are strong in core technical work but not ready for broader strategic and enterprise-facing demands. Half of CFOs say faster leadership development is needed to avoid succession risk.
This is a strategic risk, not an HR nicety. The function needs leaders who can navigate technology change, partner across the business, and make sound judgments in unfamiliar situations, capabilities that traditional finance career paths simply don't produce. Stretch assignments, cross-functional rotations, and time-bound transformation roles give future leaders reps beyond closed books and control matrices, and they do it while the current CFO is still in place to coach.
The shift: Treat leadership development as a core lever of value creation with the same review cadence as any investment portfolio. Identify the future enterprise-facing leaders now, and build structured pathways that force exposure beyond traditional finance responsibilities.
From Intent to Operating Model
Translating intent into sustained impact depends on how consistently finance embeds value creation into everyday practice, and the honest constraint is that many CFOs remain trapped in operating models designed for control rather than insight, with limited capacity left over for strategic work. Restructuring finance to support faster, more integrated decision-making and closer collaboration with the business is the connective tissue between all five shifts, without it, each one becomes another aspiration on a list, and the 35-point gap survives another survey cycle.
The uncomfortable framing for any CFO: the survey shows the profession already agrees on what the role should be. Agreement was never the scarce resource. The scarce resources are capacity freed from control work, metrics brave enough to measure uncertain bets, teams drilled in adaptability, an offensive AI posture, and a leadership bench built on purpose. Those five are each a decision, and decisions are exactly what the value-creation gap has been waiting for.
Based on the EY 2026 Global DNA of the CFO survey as reported in the WSJ CFO Journal (partners.wsj.com). Views in the source article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Ernst & Young LLP or other members of the global EY organization.
