2025 Predictions for CFOs

2025 promises a burst of change greater than anything we’ve seen since the first half of 2020. To help set you up for a successful 2025, here are four key trends that CFOs need to be across. Each will have a profound effect on the business environment, operations, and profitability. Leading Futurist, Mark Pesce shares his predictions for the year ahead for CFO Magazine A/NZ

ONE: GET READY TO RRRRRUMBLE!

Love him or hate him (those seem to be the only options) soon-to-be-President-again Trump looks to be reshaping the entire idea of governance. Less lazzie faire and more WWE meets The Apprentice: DC, expect four years of unending, high drama. Moving from crisis to crisis at ‘Ludicrous Speed’, Trump will do what he has always done so well – keep the spotlight on himself. Will we see crushing tariffs? Mass deportations of illegal immigrants? Defeat in Ukraine? All of those prospects – and many, many more – will dazzle and terrify a global audience who can’t look away.

Offscreen, Trump-loyal apparachiks promise to dismantle massive portions of the US Federal apparatus. Elon Musk, co-head of the newly-christened Department of Government Efficiency, intends to slash a trillion or two from the federal budget. How that wouldn’t directly lead to a massive contraction in the US economy hasn’t been explained – or even acknowledged. But hey, macroeconomics – what even are they?

We need to be prepared for almost any possibility; the one thing we can know for sure is that a year from now the geopolitical landscape will be irrevocably changed. In 2025, fortune favours the flexible.

TWO: BACKING INTO THE FOUR-DAY WEEK

Over the last forty years, the ‘full-time’ work week shrank from 40 hours to just 33. We’ve already arrived at what our parents would have called a ‘four-day week’. Countless trials conducted here in Australia and throughout the rest of the world demonstrate how a four-day week increases both productivity and job satisfaction, creating a win-win for businesses ready to make the shift official. In 2025 we’ll see some of Australia’s more forward-thinking firms adopt the four-day workweek as a core practice – offering it up as a drawcard to retain the best talent.

For all that, the ‘war over work’ hasn’t ended. 2025 will see more businesses force ‘Return to Office’ mandates on staff, claiming them as necessary for ‘productivity’ and ‘cohesion’. Yet it’s now widely recognised that RTOs tend to precede down quarters – while also highlighting inflexible, brittle leadership. Many of the beneficiaries of flexible work – caregivers, mostly female – decide to change jobs rather than go into the office five days a week. Markets which once hailed RTOs as a sign of better things to come now mark down businesses caught out using RTOs as a sleight-of-hand to hide retrenchments.

2025 looks to be the year that smart business transition from enduring hybrid to embracing its potential to increase productivity, retain key staff, and reduce operational costs.

THREE: DATA DANGER

Over the last decade many organisations indiscriminately collected, collated, and analyzed data from customers, vendors, and employees. “Data is the new oil” became a rallying cry – today, huge ‘data lakes’ burn through significant IT spend, marketers puzzle through the right questions to ask their data – while CSIOs worry day and night about how to secure all that data. Recent data breaches at Medibank and Optus show how fragile these systems can be – and how easy it is to lose control of ‘Personally Identifiable Information’ (PII).

With new laws from the Commonwealth to govern PII, 2025 will see many organisations undergoing a pivot from seeing data an an inexhaustible revenue generator, to seeing it as an inexhaustible black hole in an ever-expanding IT budget. As the cost for securing data begins to equal or even exceed any of the value generated by that data, data lakes will start to feel more like a boat anchors. 2025 looks to be the tipping point, a moment when CFOs begin to ask their orgs a hard question: sure, you can keep all that data – but do you really want to?

The Commonwealth’s ‘Trust Exchange’ – announced in August 2024, and just now entering early testing – offers a solution allowing organisations to use PII for validation of customer details – without requiring them to retain PII forever. By the end of 2025, organisations will have a viable mechanism that allows them to delete much of their ‘dangerous’ PII data, but in order to do that, they’ll have to redesign much of their existing data harvesting systems around Trust Exchange. CFOs can expect IT departments to come around, cap in hand, asking for extra budget to manage the change. Will it be worth it? A CFO will need a strong understanding of the costs of managing and securing PII before they can answer that question.

FOUR: FROM AI TO A-WHY

2024 saw ‘Generative AI’ features shoehorned into a vast range of products and services – whether or not it made much sense. With ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Einstein AI, and much more besides, 2024 often felt like a senseless deluge: endless products, without much of a use case. Sure, you can have Copilot draft an email or rewrite a paragraph, but is that something you need? Wouldn’t it be faster to do it yourself most of the time?

CFOs have sensibly started demanding business cases before they sign off on any pricey software licenses. To date those business cases can broadly be summed up as a bit of hand-waving about ‘staying current’ and ‘best practices’ and ‘the board is concerned we’re not keeping up’. At this point, no firm anywhere has shown any transformational productivity breakthroughs using AI – just lots of tweaks around the edges that may be nice, but frequently don’t come cheap.

The past year was all about everything AI could do, but as the AI mania wears off across 2025, we’ll be asking what we want AI to do for us.

In 2025, good business sense remains the best foundation for business success. Spend money wisely, investing in your organisation and staff, building capability and flexibility, allowing you to take advantage of the opportunities sure to open up in a time of ‘all change’. Reign in the ‘irrational exuberance’ of staffers who see only the upside of innovations, ignoring their costs.

And never forget this is a marathon, not a sprint. You won’t be left behind — so long as you say in the race.