CFO Predictions > 2026

It’s the time of year to blow the dust off the crystal ball (wish I had one of those!) and peer into the year now almost upon us. What does it hold for the CFO and finance more broadly?

International Outlook: From Globalism to ‘Block Frenemies’

Precipitated by an unprecedented and fully empowered US presidency leaning into ‘America First’, international trade has transformed more over the past year than in the previous generation. A low-level and largely undeclared economic war between the world’s two largest economies will continue unabated. Both parties will continually assure markets that everything will be fine. That might be the case – but within a fundamentally transformed economic context.

Global trade has fractured, giving way under the pressure both of tariffs and industry-saving protectionist barriers. Three great blocks have already emerged: the US and its closest trading partners (Canada, Mexico, and the UK), China and its BRICS partners, and the European Union. Each block will continue to lower trade barriers within its respective block while making it more difficult to export from their block to a competing block.

The ‘chip wars’ between the US and China – and the export embargo on critical minerals – set the pattern for how these wars between ‘block frenemies’ play out. “Make nice with us, and we’ll sell you all the things you need. Or – care to build a semiconductor fabrication sector from scratch?” gets a reply of, “Try making your semiconductors without our gadolinium, praeseodymium, and lutetium.”

Many more fractures will appear – in automobile manufacturing, in agriculture, renewables, and other sectors of the economy. In practice, this means we should expect – and do our best to anticipate – wild variability in prices, along with a return elevated levels of inflation, as market efficiencies get trumped (see what I did there?) by protectionist initiatives.

Australia’s defense relationships lie within the US-led block, but its trade relationships lie principally within the China-block. Although that will cause Australia no end of tactical headaches, this represents an incredible strategic advantage: Australia can act as a sort of ‘Switzerland’ of inter-block trade: keeping one foot in and one foot out, facilitating, mediating, and doing its best to help everyone get what they want – without wrecking the economy for all concerned.

In the CFO Suite: The Year of ‘Vibe Accounting’

Three years after the launch of ChatGPT – the app that changed everything – the CFO’s office has experienced almost none of the productivity uplift promised by ‘generative’ AI tools. That will change in early 2026 – transforming many practices in finance.

Anthropic – the quiet and studious brother of loud and flashy OpenAI – has begun a slow rollout of ‘Claude for Excel‘, a tool that deeply integrates a very smart and capable artificial intelligence – Claude Opus 4.5 is considered best-in-class – into the spreadsheet everyone loves (and loves to hate). Microsoft has been trying to do this for three years with Copilot; their attempts have ended in complete failure – and a US $5 billion investment in Anthropic.

Anthropic has developed a suite of tools allowing its AI to translate human directives into set of actions that the AI can then carry out. That’s ‘agentic’ AI – as opposed to the ‘conversational’ AI of ChatGPT – and it’s incredibly powerful. Pop a complex spreadsheet into Claude for Excel, give it a moment to digest both the formulas and the values, then ask any question, or make any request – most of the time, Claude for Excel will ‘just do it’.

If that sounds too good to be true, take heart from the fact that for the past several months, programmers have been enjoying just this capability, as their development tools have been deeply integrated with Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini. It is now possible to tell these tools, “I need a program that does such and such, written in language blah, and with these features ONE, TWO and THREE.” The AI agent asks a few questions, then gets down to work.

Depending on the precision of the request, the resulting program might be bang-on-target – or a complete muddle. When the programmer knows what they’re doing, they can ‘steer’ the AI to a successful goal. Where they don’t, well, as has long been noted, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

That’s great news for the CFO – they’re across the business, the spreadsheets, and come equipped with deep experience. That makes CFOs ideal ‘drivers’ for these new AI tools. The result will be nothing short of phenomenal: the rise of the ’10x engineer’ will be followed by the ’10x CFO’ – capable of incredible feats of financial forecasting and management.

Detractors will deride this ‘vibe accounting’ – and to be clear, these AI tools are always imperfect. But that’s exactly the shape of the strategic opportunity for CFOs – the deeper your domain knowledge, the better the results you’ll achieve from Claude for Excel – and many similar tools that coming our way in 2026.

Early Warning: AI Fraud EVERYWHERE

You’ll be needing every bit of that amplified expertise and capability, because what AI giveth with one hand, it taketh away with the other: 2026 will see an exponential increase in AI-powered fraud.

The latest AI-powered image generators have become so capable they can perfectly fake receipts. Although watermarking can be used to detect real images from AI forgeries, it’s not terribly difficult to remove a watermark. This means that all of the systems we currently employ to manage incoming invoices and expenses will need to be secured against these kinds of fraudulent attacks.

That’s not unprecedented; Brazil, a nation plagued by high levels of fraud, instituted a national system of receipt registration making it nearly impossible to counterfeit transactions. Nota Fisical Electronica, as it’s known, means that Brazil already has an effective defense against AI receipt counterfeiting. By the end of 2026, expect parliaments in both Australia and New Zealand to be looking at similar regulations to fight fraud and maintain financial stability.

That’s not the worst of it. ‘Voice cloning’ – creating a synthetic voice of a real person based on a sample of their own voice – has gone real-time. When your CEO calls demanding an immediate transfer of funds to a Cayman Islands account for an barely-explained purchase, you’ll want to have processes in place to double and triple check their identity, location, and purpose. And not just the CEO, but everyone in the organisation. Responsibility for this will fall somewhere between the CISO, CRO, CSO and CFO – which means you’ll need to be diligent in ensuring these necessary safeguards won’t fall between the cracks of organisational silos.

2026 could be rough sailing. Massive shifts in international trade, in tooling in the CFO’s suite, and an unprecedented rise in AI-fueled fraud could leave CFOs feeling as though they’re running as fast as they can just to stay in place.

But these storms will pass. Conditions will calm. We’ll look back and wonder how so much changed, so quickly.