ACCOUNTING

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A survey of global accountants by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants found that AI is accountants’ greatest ethical concern. Almost two-thirds of the 1,178 respondents (61%) named AI among the profession’s top three ethical challenges—nearly twice as many as the last time the survey was fielded, when 32% named AI as a top-three concern in 2024.

Ethical concerns around AI, the authors of a report on the survey wrote, include “overreliance, verification, reduced human judgement, confidentiality, inadequate human oversight on AI outputs, transparency, unclear accountability, lack of appropriate governance, and weak organizational guardrails.”

Finance and accounting professionals in 135 countries chose AI as a top ethical challenge more often than they did having ethical leadership (43%) or an ethical culture (39%), the geopolitical environment (34%), and even fraud (33%).

Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. In the past twelve months, media reports have alleged instances of hallucination errors in reports by large accounting firms. The IRS has published advice for tax professionals cautioning that AI work products need to be carefully reviewed. And a new auditor’s guide from the AICPA cautions that AI tools “can introduce new risks that auditors must be cognizant of in fulfilling the critical role they play in performing financial statement audits,” according to a press release.

But three-quarters of the surveyed accountants said AI increases the quality of their work.—CV

      

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STRATEGIC RISK

Mohamed Younis, NACD

“Private enterprise right now is in a really interesting moment where public opinion is becoming increasingly a topic of focus,” Mohamed Younis, the new SVP of content at the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD), told CFO Brew at that organization’s annual summit in Washington, DC.

Younis would know: He joined the NACD this year after 15 years at Gallup, where, in his last role, he served as editor in chief. Younis spoke with us about how boards and C-suites should approach data, and what he’s learned about boards of directors’ priorities.

How data-savvy do boards and C-suites need to be?

I think boards are some of the most data-savvy people on the planet. I think it’s more about separating signal from noise. We live in a world now where there’s so much information, and most of it is fascinating but mildly useful…A lot of the KPIs and metrics that we grew up thinking of as table stakes are still important, but they don’t show the whole picture, and they’re not enough to base every decision on.

The other thing I’ve been hearing a lot from highly successful and important folks is the idea that a multi-year plan is not really feasible anymore…I think that’s also a reflection of the rate of change, but also a reflection of the kind of ingenuity and creativity on boards, and how people are trying to think outside of the box and how to stay current.

Some signals that boards are paying attention to are a distraction, Younis says.—CV

      

M&A

Morning Brew Inc, Photo: Adobe Stock

A storm is brewing in Silicon Valley, where the winds of the so-called SaaSpocalypse threaten to blow away the software industry as we know it. Rather than batten down the hatches, Salesforce is picking up provisions to ride it out.

The software giant announced on Tuesday that it will acquire Braze for $5.66 billion in cash; Salesforce’s fifth-largest acquisition. Braze, an AI-powered marketing platform that helps businesses build and personalize messages to consumers, serves enterprise customers like Canva, Equinox, Venmo, and Dairy Queen.

For Salesforce, the acquisition aims to strengthen its existing marketing business and expand Braze’s services to Salesforce’s much larger customer base.

Adapt or get swept away. It’s an aggressive but perhaps necessary move amid the SaaSpocalypse—the volatile market that enterprise software companies have endured this year because of artificial intelligence. Investors are debating whether AI agents and tools could make traditional subscription products obsolete, and SaaS developers have weathered the resulting tumult.

“The timing and price are likely to be a bit of a debate,” one research analyst said, according to Brew Markets.—SY

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Stat: $30.7 billion. That’s the approximate cost of building a one-gigawatt AI data center in Abilene, Texas. The majority of that price tag, $17.1 billion, comes from hardware costs (think: chips and servers). (Bloomberg)

Quote: “I feel like I’m tap dancing through a minefield…Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes. But at the end of the day, the shareholders have to be supportive of this.”—Elon Musk, when asked about a potential SpaceX-Tesla merger (CNBC)

Read: Lest we forget, inflation isn’t unique to the US—it’s plaguing economies globally. In the UK, prices increased at a higher rate than the Bank of England wanted in September, bolstering the case for a rate increase. (Wall Street Journal)

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