Prepare for your company’s board to place a high emphasis on strategy and organic growth in 2026. Nearly eight out of 10 board members in the National Association of Corporate Directors’ latest governance survey said they expect their organizations to grow primarily through organic means this year, while only two in 10 said they expect inorganic growth (M&As, joint ventures, etc.) to be the main driver.

Strategy will also be top of mind. Three-fifths of board members said strategy was the top area they wanted to improve oversight around this year, and 62% said they’re discussing strategy more often during board meetings.

“That focus on execution is going to be big for both the CEOs and the CFOs,” NACD President and CEO Peter Gleason told CFO Brew. “That’s going to put pressure on both the CFOs and the CEOs.” CFOs could expect to spend a lot of time on capital allocation, both in AI investment and in other areas, he said.

Boards’ biggest concern heading into 2026 is the economy. One-third predicted a recession would occur by Q2, while 52% foresaw a “soft landing.”

Six in 10 respondents named changing economic conditions as the factor that would most affect their companies’ performance in 2026, mentioning issues such as inflation, commodity prices, interest rate changes, and the job market.

And what about AI? Keep reading.—CV

At CFO Brew, we know that every CFO is their own unique, special snowflake. At the same time, many CFOs are going to be dealing with some of the same issues in 2026. As the global head of financial services at AI cloud platform Snowflake (see what we did there?), Rinesh Patel gets a front row seat to CFOs’ pressing concerns.

His job is to keep tabs on internal and external trends to build products that will keep Snowflake’s corporate customers on the front lines of data management, and create cost and productivity efficiencies.

CFO Brew recently talked with Patel about the challenges he expects CFOs to face in 2026.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you see as the biggest change happening in the CFO office this year?

The first is really a mindset shift. It’s become very clear AI is no longer about experimentation. There’s an acceptance that AI is clearly a powerful technology, and we don’t need to prove that anymore. That said, what we do need to prove, the only question CFOs have is really about the ROI. How do we prove the ROI?

Historically, it was all about this shiny, hot new model that was available. That’s shifted. Now, customers are starting with the commercial outcomes led by the business…Is the problem we’re solving acquisition, retention, margin, capital efficiency? Then they’re defining the data, the quality, the governance, the accessibility of data. And then lastly, they’re looking at AI large language models to be the connective tissue between the data and the commercial outcome.

So they don’t mention AI or the hot new model until the potential ROI is now defined, the data is defined, and crucially, the business is bought in. CFOs are becoming more use-case specific, focusing on productivity at scale.

Keep reading.—JK

Wall Street just got a Discord invite.

Discord has confidentially filed for an IPO, according to reports, and is working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan as lead advisers.

Founded in 2015, Discord offers voice, video, and text chat tools, and now has more than 200 million monthly active users, making it one of the largest standalone social platforms not yet public.

A 2021 private round pegged the company’s valuation at roughly $15 billion, shortly after it passed on a $12 billion takeover bid from Microsoft.

The IPO watchlist. Discord’s move puts the spotlight back on long-awaited IPO candidates that could debut at massive valuations, as the capital demands of AI growth push companies toward public markets. Here are some of the biggest names investors are watching in 2026.

Keep reading on Brew Markets.—SY

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s weekly news quiz has been compared to getting a company-wide shout-out from your boss. It’s that satisfying.