Business Partnering

The Skill That Will Define Finance Post AI

Business Partnering and the benefits of it have gone a little quiet over the last year or two.

The shiny new toy of AI has arrived, and understandably it has captured the attention of the finance function.

The function that builds reports and dashboards, provides commentary on every variance, and creates forecasts about the future via elaborate spreadsheets has suddenly been handed tools that promise to do all of that faster.

But the real question is what happens next once we lock these shiny new toys into our day-to-day work and automate many of the hygiene tasks that have traditionally filled finance calendars.

Artificial Intelligence is about to make finance the fastest function in the organisation.

Reports will appear in seconds. Analysis that once took hours will take minutes. Forecasts will update themselves automatically and be available live.

The speed at which finance can process and produce information is about to increase dramatically if it hasn’t already.

But speed was never the real constraint in finance.

The real constraint has always been what happens next. What happens once you take what you are seeing out into the organisation and attempt to influence the course of something.

Across the finance teams I work with globally, only 2% of finance professionals have the skills and behaviours required to genuinely influence decisions in their organisations.

Around 19% operate as advisors to the business. They help, but they are still a little passive in the way they engage.

The remaining majority (79%) spend most of their time producing information and explaining what has already happened.

AI will accelerate that process significantly. It will make reporting cleaner, analysis faster and forecasting more efficient.

But it will not solve the underlying problem of moving the remaining 79% of the finance population into a space where they are genuinely influencing decisions.

In fact, in many organisations it is already starting to expose this exact gap.

A CFO I spoke with recently summed it up neatly. “AI has made my team faster than ever,” he said. “The problem is we still aren’t getting any impact to our bottom line.”

The reports are arriving quicker. The dashboards are more sophisticated. The commentaries are written. The analysis is more automated.

But the finance team is still largely sitting behind their desks pressing buttons.

What AI is doing is removing the friction from the technical side of finance. Tasks that once required significant manual effort will increasingly happen automatically. The preparation of information will become easier than it has ever been.

But preparing information is not the same as influencing a decision.

That part remains stubbornly human.

If finance teams do not develop that capability, the uncomfortable reality is that many mid-level roles built around producing analysis could eventually be replaced by more junior staff who have simply grown up using these tools.

What we are increasingly seeing inside organisations is that speed without influence changes very little. Information may arrive faster, but if no one is shaping what that information means for the business, decisions still stall.

Reports sit in inboxes. Dashboards are opened and glanced at. Meetings occur where numbers are explained, but little actually changes.

At the same time, AI has a habit of exposing weaknesses that were previously hidden. Poor master data becomes immediately obvious when automated systems begin pulling from it. The classic “garbage in, garbage out” problem suddenly becomes more visible and, in many cases, more urgent.

Instead of reducing workload, some teams initially find themselves busier fixing and reworking the very data foundations their systems rely on.

That can be resolved with time. But the underlying issue is the same.

Technology can produce information. It cannot replace judgment.

And judgment is exactly where finance needs to move.

This is where business partnering becomes central to the future of the profession. Or we create finance functions that are glorified IT departments spitting out information for the rest of the organisation to decipher.

I say yes to the former.

For many finance professionals, this represents a shift in identity. The profession has historically rewarded technical precision. Being the person with the correct numbers has been the source of credibility. Accuracy, completeness and control have rightly been the foundations of the function.

But influencing decisions requires a different set of behaviours.

It requires finance professionals to understand context, embrace a degree of ambiguity and apply judgment.

It requires them to engage with operational leaders and ask questions about what is actually happening inside the business, without showing up as a threat.

It requires them to connect financial outcomes to commercial drivers and speak the language of the business.

For many people in finance this does not come naturally.

The encouraging news is that it can be learned, and often through relatively small shifts in behaviour rather than wholesale change.

Most of the barriers we see are surprisingly consistent.

The first is training. Finance professionals are educated to be technically correct rather than commercially influential. Accounting standards, financial controls and reporting frameworks dominate early career development. Very little time is spent learning how to communicate financial insights in a way that shapes decisions.

Imagine if your CPD was focused on that. Way more helpful to your organisation.

The second is communication. Turning data into action requires clarity and the ability to simplify complex information. Without those skills, finance often defaults to presenting more numbers and more detail rather than less information and clearer insight.

The third barrier is exposure. Many finance professionals have simply never seen what good business partnering actually looks like. The concept is widely discussed, but rarely demonstrated in a practical way.

Overlay all of that with confidence. Walking into an operational meeting and challenging assumptions can feel uncomfortable if your entire career has been built around producing the numbers rather than shaping the conversation around them.

It requires finance professionals to step into discussions where they may not have all the answers.

They certainly won’t have all of the information.

Fortunately, they do not need it.

One of the most useful shifts finance teams can make is recognising that influence rarely comes from having the answers. It comes from asking the right questions.

In most cases, finance professionals do not even need to know the exact question in advance. They simply need to know the type of question that moves a discussion forward.

Questions like:

• What is the biggest risk to this moving forward?
• How will that decision impact our margins?
• What would need to change for that to be successful?
• How confident are we in that assumption?

Curious, open questions like these shift the role of finance from explaining numbers to exploring implications. They open conversations rather than close them.

And anyone could ask them – you don’t need to know anything. Your AI is probably already doing it to you, just in a weird not relevant way.

For CFOs thinking about the impact of AI on their teams, this is where the real opportunity sits.

Technology will continue to make finance faster and more capable on the technical side. That trend has been underway for years and will only accelerate.

But the value of the function will increasingly be determined by something else entirely: the quality of the conversations finance is having with the business.

That requires a subtle but important shift in how we think about the function. Instead of measuring finance primarily by the quality of the reports it produces, we should start paying closer attention to the quality of the conversations finance professionals are having across the organisation.

Are they present in operational discussions? Are they asking questions about commercial drivers? Are they translating numbers into implications that leaders can act on?

And are we investing in developing the capabilities that allow them to do that effectively?

Communication. Influence. Storytelling. The ability to simplify complexity and explain what matters most.

These are not soft skills. They are professional skills.

In a world where machines can produce analysis instantly, they become core finance capabilities.

About the Author

Andrew Jepson – CEO & Founder | The FBP Team

Andrew started The FBP Team to introduce a whole new set of tools and techniques to the global finance community. He has over 20 years of experience as a senior finance executive, and also as a General Manager outside of Finance.

He is responsible for designing and developing all of our training content and raising awareness of The FBP Team across the globe. Based in Sydney, he doesn’t take himself too seriously, but he takes what he does very seriously.

To learn more visit: https://www.financebusinesspartnering.com/