Why tomorrow’s CFO shouldn’t stay in their lane

More than half of finance leaders (57%) now count themselves among the top influencers of company strategy, according to Deloitte's Finance Trends 2026 survey of 1,326 global finance leaders. Those same leaders carry about 20% more responsibilities on average than their peers. That's not one executive's opinion about where the job is heading. It's a structural shift, already measurable.

Aidana Zhakupbekova is a live example of it. She started as a finance controller and grew, title by title, until this year she became Rydoo's Chief Operating Financial Officer (COFO), a role that formally folds operations into what used to be a purely financial mandate. She talks through the shift on a recent episode of the Finance Chief podcast, hosted by Ella Wilkinson. You don't need to watch or listen to see the pattern, though. It's already showing up in the numbers.

The CFO job has quietly doubled in scope

As companies scale, more decisions need operational context, not just a financial sign-off. A pricing call, a hiring plan, a vendor switch: each one touches finance, but none of them can be judged on the numbers alone.

Zhakupbekova puts it plainly:

"...you rarely do just finance, especially if you're in a leadership role..."

The higher up you go, she argues, the less realistic it becomes to stay purely financial. At Rydoo, the shift built gradually. RevOps and BI centralised under her first, then legal followed, and after last year's acquisition of Semine, the finance and operations reporting lines converged into a single title.

"I like to refer to that as almost like an orchestra situation. The business plans make no sense if it's just a pretty Excel sheet and you're never going to be able to execute it. So even if you want to be really good just as a finance leader alone, you still need to understand how the whole thing works."

That's the mechanism behind Deloitte's number. CFOs aren't choosing to take on more. The job itself no longer separates cleanly into finance and everything else.

The ownership is measurable, not just the workload. Deloitte found 36% of finance leaders, and 42% of CFOs, are now primarily responsible for cost and expense management rather than advising on it from the side. Those owners meet or exceed their cost-savings goals 47% of the time, against 39% for peers in a supporting role.

So the wider remit isn't dilution. On this evidence, the leaders who hold operational responsibility outperform the ones who only report on it. Surgent's 2026 outlook reaches the same conclusion, arguing the CFO is now expected to sit at the strategic centre of the organisation, shaping decisions on capital, risk, technology and long-term direction.

Numbers don't explain themselves. Operations do.

A financial yes or no is the easy part. Defending it is where operational fluency actually gets tested.

"It's easy to say yes or no just looking at the numbers..."

The "why" behind a decision, on capital allocation, vendor choice, or market expansion, almost always sits outside the spreadsheet. Without understanding the operational reality behind a number, a finance leader can approve it but can't defend it in the room.

This isn't only a scale-up problem. Walmart controller David Chojnowski, quoted in the same Deloitte report, describes a cadence that has changed outright: "In the past, we may have run scenarios monthly; now, we've been running models and doing analysis almost daily."

At that speed, there is no window to go and find the operational context after the number lands. It has to already be in the room. Advanced scenario planning is now the capability 30% of finance leaders say they most need, ahead of everything else on Deloitte's list.

Surgent makes a similar case in its 2026 outlook on the CFO role: technical competency is the floor for finance executives now, not the ceiling. The financial skill set was never the finish line. It's table stakes.

AI is shrinking the busywork, but judgement is still key

Automating processes to free people for higher-value work is the top finance talent priority for 2026, cited by 49% of CFOs in Deloitte's Q4 2025 CFO Signals survey. We covered what that shift demands from teams before, in How finance teams are making AI work for everyone.

Zhakupbekova's caution is that automation shouldn't come with blind trust. Early in her career, on only her second day at a new job, she was handed a spreadsheet model built by someone else to calculate a month-end accounting entry. She entered the numbers, the model spat out a result, and it was wrong. Only her team leader, glancing over her shoulder, caught it before it became a problem. She holds her own teams to that same standard with AI output today:

"I'm being very cautious with my teams, because they also provide the foundation of analysis and decision making, to at least at this point never trust whatever AI gives you... it's fundamental that team members understand what's actually going on in the business."

Her point is that removing busywork doesn't remove the need for someone who understands the business well enough to notice when an output looks wrong.

The wider data backs the caution more than the enthusiasm. 87% of CFOs expect AI to be extremely or very important to finance operations in 2026, and only 2% say it won't matter. Yet just 21% of active AI users believe their investments have delivered clear, measurable value, and only 14% have fully integrated AI agents into the finance function.

Conviction is close to universal. Proven return is not. Until that gap closes, the judgement layer is doing more work than the automation is.

What this means if you want the CFO seat (or already have it)

Workday frames the future CFO as a "strategic navigator," co-piloting the business alongside the CEO rather than reporting on it after the fact. That framing lines up with what's showing up across the data and the podcast alike: financial credentials alone won't carry a finance leader as far as they used to. Operational fluency, and the soft skills that come with it, has to be built deliberately, not assumed.

Finance functions are already building it rather than waiting for it to arrive. 64% plan to infuse more technical skills and capabilities across 2025 and 2026, and 28% are insourcing talent from other departments. That second number is the more telling one: operational fluency arriving through the org chart, not through a job spec.

If you're on the way up, Surgent puts a runway on it, roughly three to five years of deliberate development between controller and CFO readiness. Looking back at her 19-year-old self starting out at IBM, Zhakupbekova's own advice had little to do with leadership theory and everything to do with paying attention to the work already in front of her:

"I understand you don't like every single part of your current job, but trust me, somehow it will help you later on in your career."

She turns that into something any finance professional can act on now, rather than a reflection on the past:

"Look at every job that you have, and the job you currently have, and think about how parts of it can help you in your long-term journey."

Scope doesn't arrive all at once. It compounds, one unglamorous rotation at a time, until the finance leader who paid attention to operations turns out to be the only one qualified to hold both jobs.

For Zhakupbekova's full story, including her path from Kazakhstan to the C-suite and her views on diversity in finance, the complete episode of the Finance Chief podcast is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts.