Across many industries and businesses, including within the Summit Partners portfolio, AI conversations among finance leaders have shifted. Based on our observations, many CFOs are no longer asking whether to adopt AI; they're asking how to scale it thoughtfully and demonstrate potential return on investment. Below are several areas where finance teams within the Summit portfolio are working with AI today, along with certain key considerations for CFOs looking to move forward with confidence.
AI Use Cases in the Office of the CFO
Automating Reporting and Other Routine Tasks
Automation of high-volume, repetitive finance tasks has emerged as one of the more immediate areas of AI impact. AI can produce detailed financial reports from multiple sources in less than the time required by manual processes, helping to drive measurable efficiency gains in financial close, AR, AP and cash management processes.(1) Many finance teams across the Summit portfolio have made targeted investments in these areas, and many are seeing compelling results, including faster processing, fewer exceptions necessitating human intervention, and financial close cycles that have been cut by days. Many repetitive tasks your finance team handles today may be a candidate for AI-driven efficiency improvements, and given the pace of development, tasks that were not automatable a year ago may well be now.
Enhancing Financial Planning and Forecasting
Additional automation can free time and create space for CFOs and finance teams to tackle more strategic priorities. AI can rapidly analyze large volumes of historical data to identify patterns and help surface actionable insights, and its application in financial planning and forecasting is advancing rapidly. Importantly, AI can help identify root causes of budget variances, detect reporting anomalies, and run scenarios in an effort to understand the impact of macroeconomic or industry-driven changes. In this capacity, AI can function as more than a reporting tool, becoming a partner in the strategic financial decision-making process.
Streamlining Communication and Collaboration
We are also seeing AI’s meaningful impact on communication and collaboration, both within the finance team and across other functions. Finance professionals are often responsible for translating financial data into clear business narratives, and we encourage teams to use AI to assist in drafting emails, accounting memos, job descriptions, management discussion and analysis (MD&A) and training documents. Through our work within the Summit Partners portfolio, we have seen a growing adoption of chat-based interfaces within finance teams. These tools enable finance team members to interact with data using natural language, helping to democratize access to insights across their organizations.
In our view, human review and editing remain essential, particularly for anything touching regulatory compliance or external reporting, where accuracy is non-negotiable.
Managing Risk and Cybersecurity
One area that we believe has grown in importance is the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. Data security and privacy now rank as the top concern for CFOs and finance leaders, according to Protiviti's Global Finance Trends Survey.(2) This is no longer purely an IT issue. We see CFOs increasingly taking an ownership role, partnering closely with CEOs, CIOs and CTOs to help build governance frameworks and working to ensure that AI integration doesn't introduce new vulnerabilities into financial systems. Finance leaders need to be proactive architects of these governance structures, rather than passive recipients of IT policy.
Recommendations for CFOs
Leverage your existing platforms. Many finance teams have already taken a first step by providing access to general-purpose AI tools like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude — and if you haven't, this is a practical place to start. Beyond that, I encourage CFOs to evaluate the AI features being introduced within the platforms your team already uses. In many cases, meaningful automation opportunities may already be available within your existing ERP, EPM and AR/AP systems, without requiring new vendors or lengthy implementations. Across both general-purpose tools and embedded platforms, be mindful of security and data privacy risks, and help ensure compliance with your organization's IT policies — opting for enterprise-grade licenses and robust security measures where possible.
Define ROI before you scale. One of the lessons we’ve learned from early AI adopters within our portfolio and beyond is that deploying AI on a use-case by use-case basis, without a broader plan, can make it difficult to capture meaningful enterprise value. Before scaling any initiative, we encourage teams to define how they intend to measure success — financial close cycle time, forecast accuracy, cost savings and hours saved on reporting, as examples. AI investments should be evaluated with the same rigor applied to any other capital allocation decision – an existing process CFOs are already well familiar with.
Stay ahead of agentic AI. Agentic AI is rapidly gaining traction in the Office of the CFO, with surveys suggesting more than half of finance teams expect to be using agentic AI by the end of 2026.(3) While adoption is still in the early stages, we believe the organizations better positioned to benefit will be those that have invested in the foundational work. In our experience, clean data, modern architecture and an aligned AI strategy will help determine how quickly your organization can benefit as these capabilities continue to mature.
Build governance alongside adoption. As AI takes on a more active role in financial processes, the governance frameworks around it need to keep pace. Define acceptable use policies, establish human review checkpoints for high-stakes outputs, and ensure your organization's AI strategy is coordinated at the executive and board levels.
Growth Timeline
Looking Ahead
We’ve seen the impact of AI on the Office of the CFO move from theoretical to tangible. The CFOs we see best positioned for the years ahead are those who approach AI not as a technology project to be delegated, but as a core strategic capability to be built, with the same rigor and long-term perspective they bring to other decisions.
In our view, AI is unlikely to replace the CFO, but we believe CFOs who effectively leverage AI will increasingly outperform those who do not.
Learn More: For more strategic insights and best practices for growth-driven executives, subscribe to The Ascent, Summit’s quarterly newsletter.
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Sources
(1) LEK Consulting, “L.E.K. Consulting’s 2025 Office of the CFO Survey: A Study of AI in the OCFO,” December 3, 2025.
(2) Protiviti, “Charting the Future: How CFOs Are Navigating Change with Technology and Foresight,” 2025.
(3) Deloitte, “Technology Transformation Emerges as a Top Priority for CFOs in 2026: Deloitte Q4 2025 CFO Signals Survey,” January 13, 2026.
The content herein reflects the views and opinions of Summit Partners and is intended for executives and operators considering partnering with Summit Partners. The information herein has not been independently verified by Summit Partners or an independent party. Such content and information should not be construed or relied upon as an indication of future performance or other future outcomes.
Information herein is as of April 14, 2026, unless otherwise noted. This content has been published as an update to content originally published in September 2024 and is available upon request.
In recent years, technological advances have fueled the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (“AI”), and accordingly, the use of AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in a number of sectors. Due to the rapid pace of AI innovation, the broadening scope of potential applications, and any current and forthcoming AI-related regulations, the depth and breadth of AI’s impact - including potential opportunities – remains unclear at this time.
Any reference to "expertise," "expert," or similar descriptions of knowledge or proficiency reflects the subjective assessment of Summit Partners and is intended solely to indicate familiarity with a subject area. Such characterizations may not imply formal credentialing, licensure, or any objectively verified standard of proficiency, and should not be construed or relied upon as an indication of future performance or other future outcomes.
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