This year, AI took over the corporate office. Every industry, sector, and department raced (or was pushed) to integrate AI into workflows in pursuit of productivity (if not cost-effectiveness).

Throughout the year, CFO Brew collected insights from finance chiefs on how they deployed AI across software, processes, financial analysis, and auditing. There was one CFO who used gift cards to encourage creative AI use on their teams. Another had AI transform the finance workflow.

We asked CFOs from a variety of companies and industries to tell us how they and their teams used AI this year. Here are the most revealing takeaways.

Kelly Steckelberg, CFO of Canva

For us, it has been a huge unlock. My team uses it every day to make our work smoother and faster, and it is helping us get through things that used to feel impossible…For example, we are now using AI to synthesize large datasets, stress test financial scenarios, and automate transaction processing and reconciliations. AI gets the heavy lifting started, which saves us a lot of time on manual tasks and gives the team more space to focus on the analysis that really needs human judgment.

AI is not new for us at Canva...It has freed us up to focus on higher-value projects, and it has made me step back and think about what the finance team and systems of the future should look like.

Michelle Chang, CFO of Zoom

In our tax department, customers used to be calling in or writing in with all of these tax questions. And basically, we’ve used our virtual agent product from Zoom, which is essentially meant to be a customer support virtual agent to, in essence, answer these questions. We pointed them toward our own internal reference material. We obviously made sure there was a human in the loop and all of those things to get quality results. But we’ve taken down dramatically answering the same questions all the time. Now they’re much more able to look at the tax strategy of the company…I’m able to consume a lot more information so that I can come in and analyze with more of an outside-in perspective.

Keep reading.—JK

The talk is over. In 2026, it’s time to execute.

When the CFO Alliance, a finance-professional peer community, released its latest report, called Project Greenlight, in late November, the organization said that finance experts expect 2026 to be “the most pivotal year the finance function has faced in a decade.” There’s a lot at stake for CFOs and their organizations, according to the report, including supply-chain risks, pressure to make big AI investments, and the perils of stakeholder misalignment on strategy.

CFO Brew recently spoke with Nick Araco, the CEO of CFO Alliance, to get a sense of why 2026 is shaping up to be a high-stakes year. He also shared what’s top of mind for the finance leaders he’s been speaking with.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What makes you think that 2026 will be such a pivotal year in finance?

2026 has to be a year where we replace debate with data and execution. I call it “informed execution.” We’ve seen such a rapid acceleration, given AI and technology advancements, converge with a year of volatility and uncertainty. Imagine you’re sitting in the seat of a CFO, where you’re at the intersection of that, and you’ve had a 2025 that’s caused you and your enterprises to hit a pause button. You had months, if not a whole year of pause. 2026 has to be a year of execution.

Keep reading.—AZ

Mondelēz International, the company behind popular brands like Oreo and Chips Ahoy!, is baking up something new…and we aren’t talking about cookies.

In 2024, Mondelēz’s board of directors greenlit a $1.2 billion multi-year project to revamp its global ERP and supply-chain systems. Mondelēz CTO Chris Hesse told IT Brew the project, which is expected to wrap by the end of 2028, is intended to unify the company’s fragmented systems across its global operations.

“We have different technical configurations per region. We have different operating systems, different databases, different data centers or clouds,” Hesse said. “There’s a lot of disparity.”

Preparing for takeoff. IT Brew caught up with Hesse to learn about Mondelēz’s ongoing digital transformation project. He said the past four years have been spent investing in cloud-related internal engineering capabilities, improving documentation within it, and embracing automation.

“We’ve been focused on eliminating our legacy data centers and really getting everything to the cloud,” Hesse said. He estimated the company has exited roughly half of its legacy data centers.

This “housekeeping” was crucial following a string of acquisitions that started in 2018, which left Mondelēz with the task of absorbing other companies’ legacy infrastructure.

Keep reading on IT Brew.—BM