CFO PIPELINE

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We’ve never seen the presumably magnificent 2017 film Boss Baby, but we have to imagine the plot involves a baby becoming the CFO of a Fortune 500 company. Let’s not fact-check that...

In any case, there might be a growing number of metaphorical “boss babies” in the C-suite in the year ahead: First-time CFOs made up 64% of global CFO appointments in the first half of the year, a climb from 60% in H1 2025, according to leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates’s latest CFO Turnover Index, released August 12.

The firm pointed to two primary factors driving the increase in first-time CFOs. For starters, the popularity of interim appointments is no joke, and those part-time gigs have provided “executives who have not previously held the top finance role with an opportunity to demonstrate their readiness.”

Then, there are all those finance chiefs on the opposite end of their careers: “The rising proportion of retirement-driven departures may be reducing the available pool of active, experienced CFOs, encouraging organizations to consider a broader range of first-time candidates,” Russell Reynolds added.

Long-serving finance leaders may be reaching a “natural transition point.”—NP

      

Sponsored By PwC

PwC CEO and US Senior Partner Paul Griggs notes that AI is creating a workforce dividend.

In this article, Griggs shares his POV on the debate about AI and jobs and how AI, when leveraged thoughtfully, can actually boost performance and enable capabilities that make new frontiers possible.

Together, AI and the human workforce have the potential to create a new springboard of capacity and resources.

The important part: You have to understand the sequence. Define the opportunity before deciding how you can fit your people into it. If the order of ingredients is right (think of it like a pizza), AI can fuel results now while funding tomorrow’s growth. Smells like business success.

Read more.

CFOVILLE

Michael Beer

Michael Beer is new on the job. Like, might-have-trouble-finding-the-bathroom new.

Yet even if he started his new gig as CFO of Agility Robotics, a humanoid robotics company, just a few weeks ago, Beer isn’t remotely new to the top finance seat or high-growth tech companies: Most recently, he served as CFO and head of corporate services at Energy Vault Holdings, an energy storage solutions company.

There was a time, however, when Beer might have had more trouble than just finding the bathroom if he stepped into a finance chief role.

“I didn’t necessarily come up through the Big Four accounting track, nor did I really come up through the more traditional FP&A path,” he told CFO Brew. Instead, Beer spent “15 years on the institutional sell side. Everyone from Goldman Sachs to Benchmark to Bear Stearns to Wolfe Research to Citibank.”

He’s thankful now for the “unique perspective” that the world of investment banking and equity research provided, and his comfort “working with analysts [and] investment bankers [to help] translate external expectations into internal milestones” is about to prove especially useful: In June, Agility Robotics announced its intention to go public via a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital that would value the company at around $2.5 billion.

How’s that for an onboarding task?

Michael Beer sees the SPAC deal as a starting line, not an exit.—NP

      

AI STRATEGY

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You’ve heard of name-dropping—but have you heard of productivity-dropping?

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s analysis of nearly 500,000 earnings call transcripts between 2000 and 2025, C-suite leaders are spending more time on corporate earnings calls discussing productivity: The share of AI-related productivity sentences was 15.6% in Q4 2025, up from 1.5% in the same period in 2022, the year ChatGPT launched.

The St. Louis Fed was able to determine this by scanning transcripts for mentions of keywords related to productivity (e.g., “efficiency”) and using Qwen3-3B, a large language model, to determine details like whether those keywords were used to discuss AI.

More to come. When talking about AI productivity gains, executives often focused on the future delivery of benefits. Roughly 95% of AI-related productivity sentences were forward-looking, according to the analysis, compared to 74% of non AI-related productivity sentences that discussed future gains.

IT leaders have a different view on the matter, IT Brew reports.—BM

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 5.3%. That’s what the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond hit this week, “its highest level since 2007.” (New York Times)

Quote: “We’ve identified a limited set of circumstances where we can trace that we’ve passed specific import charges onto customers, and when we receive those refunds, we will proactively contact affected customers and automatically issue refunds to them.”—Brian Olsavsky, CFO of Amazon (Fortune)

Read: The SEC is out with a set of proposed rules for cryptocurrency companies to make an easier go of raising money from token sales. (Barron’s)

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Jobs

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Corporate Controller at Continental Resources
• Director of Accounting at Arvato Bertelsmann
• Director of Accounting, Corporate and Consolidations at U.S. Physical Therapy
• Sr. Internal Auditor at FREEMAN
• Sr. Internal Auditor at Delek US Holdings