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CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.

CFO Brew

Courtney Vien

cfobrew.com

M&A is poised for a resurgence this year

A slow 2023 left PE firms with lots of dry tinder.

Natasha Piñon

Person walking up a set of stairs symbolizing the path of corporate growth strategy

Growth strategies: The basic playbook

Tried-and-true strategies are tried-and-true for a reason. 

Intuit’s AI bet is paying off

CFO Sandeep Aujla outlines AI’s role in the company’s strategy.

Two dots and an arrow connected by a curving line denoting CFO strategy

Strategy

Alex Zank

US manufacturing activity shrank for an eighth straight month in October, due to slumps in both production and inventories, according to the latest sector index from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM).

ISM’s purchasing managers index (PMI) came in at 48.7% last month, slightly lower than September’s reading of 49.1%. An index reading below 50% indicates a contraction in the manufacturing sector. Economists that Reuters 

 had predicted a slight improvement in the PMI, to 49.5%, but the government shutdown “has caused a government economic data blackout,” Reuters reported.

It was “contractions in production and inventories” that were responsible for “the 0.4-percentage point decrease of the manufacturing PMI” over the previous month, Susan Spence, chair of the ISM’s Manufacturing Business Survey Committee, said in a news release. ISM’s production index decreased 2.8 percentage points from September, to 48.2%. Its inventories index of 45.8% was down 1.9 percentage points.

All four of ISM’s demand indicators—new orders, exports, order backlogs, and customer inventories—improved, but were “still in contraction territory” last month, according to Spence.

 ISM’s prices index reading of 58% showed that manufacturers generally paid more for materials last month, albeit at a slower rate than the 61.9% reading in September. Sectors that reported paying higher raw-materials prices included apparel, appliances, computer and electronics products, furniture, and food and beverage products, among others.

Thomas Ryan, North American economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note that the prices index decrease was “the most encouraging aspect of the report,” Bloomberg 

. Ryan added that the reading hit “its lowest level since tariffs were imposed,” and it “indicates the worst of the tariff-driven pressure on manufacturers’ input costs is likely behind us.”

US manufacturing contracted for an eighth straight month in October

ISM’s latest manufacturing index showed that production and inventories weighed the sector down, though a lower pricing index offered some optimism.

Jesse Klein

Integrating AI into an organization is easier said than done—this is a lesson Cameron Kinloch, former CFO of enterprise AI developer Weights & Biases, learned firsthand. Despite leading a finance team at an AI development company, she still struggled to get her people to consistently use AI in their workflows.

As a CFO, Kinloch wasn’t alone; according to an August survey by OneStream of 350+ full-time CFOs in the US, UK and Australia, 75% said they’re in charge of their company’s AI strategy. And nearly 

 have already added AI tools to their toolbox, according to a May survey from OwlLabs and Pulse. The pressure to see tangible success may continue to intensify, as 83% of CFOs OneStream surveyed expected an increase in AI investment at their organizations next year.

When it came to her team, Kinloch saw the warning signs. She would see them spending hours on mundane tasks, but when she asked if they’d consulted their enterprise ChatGPT, “the answer was always no.”

“I realized, no one’s actually taking the time to embed it in their workflows,” Kinloch, who left Weights & Biases in June 2025 and is currently the founder of True Vantage Partners, an advisory and fractional CFO firm, told CFO Brew. “I could see that people weren’t playing around with it or using it…there needed to be a bit more top-down push to get people just to even experiment with it.”

Here are a few of the obstacles Kinloch said she identified.

Finance people, as you may have noticed, are busy. And according to Kinloch, her team was very focused on day-to-day work. Asking them to spend time learning a new tool was a challenge in that environment, and made adoption sluggish.

“It’s really hard to pick up a new tool and learn a different way of working without a top-down mandate and/or time to set aside to come up the learning curve,” she said.

When Richard Ranieri, an AI business consultant, works with a company, he combats this issue by performing an audit. He finds the biggest workflow bottlenecks and demonstrates how to solve them with AI.

“You find out the company’s biggest pain points,” he told CFO Brew. “Where they can use AI to get the best results, and how you can kind of work in tandem with people and AI so that it’s still a human-first solution, just using AI to help accelerate their situation.”

Kinloch encouraged her employees to use AI in one-on-one and team meetings. But encouragement can only go so far if people are afraid of failure.

Kinloch heard about an incident in which the finance team of another company dropped a board deck into ChatGPT and the commentary that came out was unintelligible to them.

“And the response was, don’t ever use ChatGPT again,” she said. “That’s actually part of the learning curve. You’re going to see failures first, then you can figure out how to tweak your usage.”

 from earlier this year stated that most businesses implementing AI failed to see any revenue gains. But Ranieri believes tracking revenue to understand AI’s success or failure is a mistake most companies are making.

“Although their revenue might not have changed instantly, they were able to save 10 hours a week on repetitive tasks that were originally being done by a person,” he told us in an email. “Now that person has more time to start doing other tasks that are more beneficial to the company.”

Kinloch agreed that trying to isolate revenue as a KPI would be difficult, and probably wouldn’t capture the increase in incremental revenue.

So how did Kinloch face these issues at her company? First, she tried to gamify the use of AI. She had employees demo their different use cases at a monthly meeting, and awarded giftcards for first, second, and third place. A little incentivization can go a long way.

“Make it fun,” he said. “By keeping it engaging and bouncing ideas back and forth, having a dialogue, that definitely helps.”

Kinloch also saw that her junior employees—ones less steeped in the current processes—used AI better and adopted it more quickly.

But the big thing for both Kinloch and Ranieri is training. According to Ranieri, a lot of companies rush in and add tools without training the people or training the data. In fact, only 38% of companies that have implemented AI tools have offered employee training, according to the OwlLabs and Pulse survey. Kinloch also stressed the need to “set aside time,” because she believes “it’s unrealistic to expect people to spend their nights and weekends” learning AI.

“Humans are just used to what you’re used to. And so picking up new tools and ways of working is pretty difficult. Companies that have been most successful in deploying AI at large scale have really put a lot of time and effort into the change management process.”

Collaged side by side of an AI robot and human employee working at a desk. (Credit: Morning Brew Design)

How one company got its finance team to actually use AI

Even the CFO of an AI company had to gamify AI use to get her employees on board.

This year’s National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) Summit was all about uncertainty and pressure.

You could see it in the session titles alone: Navigating Leadership Transitions in Volatile Times. Board Governance Under Uncertainty. Crucible Boards: Building Boards that Deliver When the Stakes Are High. Managing a New Wave of Reputational Risks.

Boards face myriad and overlapping challenges, from AI adoption and cybersecurity threats to geopolitical instability. Directors already have significant time commitments—around 300-plus hours per year per board, NACD President and CEO Peter Gleason said in a keynote. And that will likely increase.

“You’re going to spend even more time overseeing issues like supply chain disruption, economic volatility, shifting politics, regulations, and labor markets,” Gleason told board members.

Gleason stressed the need for boards and executives to cultivate flexibility, agility, and trust to help their companies weather the challenges. Boards can build resilience by “anchoring ourselves in practices and structures that we design and control,” Gleason said. It’s not just about “getting through the moment,” he said, but “building muscle, creative problem-solving, and thinking strategically, thoroughly understanding the risks and threats while spotting opportunities.”

The “building blocks” of resilience, he said, include “sheer perseverance.” He quoted one of the 

 movies, a favorite of his: “It ain’t about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”

 between boards and CEOs was also the theme of the NACD’s Blue Ribbon Commission report. When CEOs trust their boards and have “confidence that they can tap into their board…expertise,” NACD board member Dona Young said, “that unlocks an entirely different relationship which builds alignment and enables boards to walk the journey together with the CEO.” Boards and executives must be prepared for novel challenges to arise, and “the best way to be prepared for those moments is to have a collaborative relationship,” she said.

In the same session, NACD chair Mary Winston reiterated the bedrocks of a strong organization: “With so many priorities landing on our agendas, culture and trust are truly the foundation of strong work performance and value creation.”

And when an audience member asked how companies can show courage when their values are tested, Wayne Peacock, co-chair of the Blue Ribbon Commission, referenced famed author Clayton Christensen’s (

) belief that you should be “committed to your values 100% of the time, because…there’s no opportunity for drift.”

Companies need to “be explicit about values, to set high standards for living up to those values and to not tolerate deviation from them in exchange for maybe short-term results,” Peacock said, adding, “That’s really hard to do, but in the long run, that pays tremendous dividends.”

Dealmaking as a means of building resilience: 

Anu Aiyengar, global head of advisory and M&A at JPMorgan, brought up another path to institutional resilience: dealmaking. Companies are making acquisitions to help solve strategic problems, she said. They’re also conducting deals that will help them to grow, as having scale “make[s] your own earning stream more predictable by having more control over your supply chain, by having AI capabilities before you get disrupted by a competitor,” she said.

Companies’ desire for scale is reflected in this year’s deals market, Aiyengar said. So far in 2025, after six weeks of a “standstill” following the tariffs in April, companies started 

, especially “megadeals,” she said. She described an attitude of “you know what, I cannot afford to sit still.”

Boards must build resilience for turbulent times

This year’s NACD summit stressed uncertainty and the need for trust. 

We’ve got news for finance executives out there who find themselves missing the typically steady release of federal economic data. Amid the ongoing government shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics came back for one day only with a fresh new Consumer Price Index 

 consumer prices ticked up 0.3% in September, and increased at an annual rate of 3%.

September’s annual inflation rate was slightly higher than August’s 2.9% uptick, which CFO Brew 

 was the highest annual pace of 2025 at the time. However, things could have been worse. Economists Dow Jones polled said they expected inflation to increase 0.4% month over month and 3.1% annually, 

The stock market responded positively to the news. Stocks increased shortly after trading started on Friday morning, the Wall Street Journal 

Gasoline was the main culprit for September’s boost in prices, according to the BLS. Gas prices rose 4.1% from August, while energy prices overall increased 1.5%. Food prices, meanwhile, rose 0.2% in September. The cost for all items other than food and energy increased 0.2%, which is slightly lower than the 0.3% monthly increases that BLS reported for July and August.

The Journal noted that economists are paying close attention to “tariff-sensitive categories” like apparel, furniture, and sporting goods, which rose 0.7%, 0.9%, and 1%, respectively, from the prior month, to see how trade wars are impacting prices. As CFO Brew 

, finance executives indicated in a recent survey that “on average, price growth would be about 30 percent lower in 2025 and roughly 25 percent lower in 2026 without the addition of tariffs.”

The CPI report is the only bit of economic data the feds have released this month, “due to the shutdown,” CNN 

 earlier this month that a prolonged absence of economic data could have consequences for policymakers and business leaders, who rely on the data to make informed decisions. In the meantime, decision-makers can continue to rely on the eeny-meeny-miny-moe method.

Inflation grew again in September, but slightly less than economists expected

Yay?

Inflation up again in September, but slightly less than economists expected

 last month, because the M&A activity was buzzing with energy.

 report, deal volume in September increased 41% YoY and deal value skyrocketed by nearly 110%. A few factors drove the dealmaking boom, including a surge in large deals, private equity-led activity, and a boost in executive optimism.

 Indeed, these mega deals (which EY defines as $5 billion or more) increased 80% YoY in volume and 176.4% in value, according to the report. This mega mega-deal momentum came from “sectors like gaming, energy, telecom, and healthcare.” One such mega deal 

 (but not closed) in September was private equity’s planned $55 billion acquisition of video game giant Electronic Arts.

Other drivers include companies acquiring “high-value assets” like technology platforms and liquefied natural gas infrastructure, and a more friendly dealmaking environment thanks to “expectations of Federal Reserve 

 and stabilizing capital markets,” according to EY.

 PE firms fueled both M&A activity and IPOs in September. PE’s share of total US deal value on transactions over $100 million was nearly 60% for the month, up from roughly 45% in August, “marking a significant shift in market dynamics.” PE activity was driven by “record levels” of dry powder and favorable interest rates, according to the report.

 EY noted that “a significant backlog of transactions is poised to move forward as market conditions stabilize, with pent-up demand expected to drive an uptick in activity.” Nearly half (48%) of CEOs said they plan to pursue M&A deals in the next year, according to EY’s September 

. CEOs most frequently said they’re pursuing M&A deals to acquire new technology or IP, enter new markets or revenue streams, and to significantly expand and drive efficiencies.

Other research suggests a mixed bag of optimism and concern. A 

 from Duke University and the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and Atlanta found that CFOs are less anxious about both tariffs and uncertainty than a few months ago, but also revealed that, “on average, price growth would be about 30 percent lower in 2025…without the addition of tariffs.” A majority (62%) of business and finance leaders responding to 

 from finance talent outsourcing firm Personiv said macroeconomic shifts had “extremely significant impacts” on first-half planning.

Of course, M&A deals don’t happen on their own. Many factors, both internal and external, can make or break a deal. CFOs can facilitate successful dealmaking by preparing their teams well ahead of time and thinking through risk scenarios, according to experts who spoke with CFO Brew.

In an email, Malinda Gentry, EY-Parthenon Americas TMT and telecommunications leader, told us that despite the “wave of optimism” flowing through the US deal market, “unpredictability around recent tariff announcements and trade policy confront CFOs with new questions about supply chains, input costs, and valuation models.”

“Still, the dealmaking outlook is brightening,” Gentry continued, “and the winning CFOs aren’t waiting for stability—we’re advising them to be decisive, using volatility as a strategic advantage.”

, experts said it’s imperative that deal teams are ready to go at the drop of a hat, since windows of opportunity may open and close quickly.

Organizations can adjust to volatility by starting on deals early, according to Mike Bellin, US IPO leader at PwC.

“Irrespective of your transaction—whether you’re doing an acquisition, divestiture, capital raise, IPO—starting early is the biggest piece of guidance I give to folks,” Bellin said at reporting software developer Workiva’s annual conference in September. “Whether you’re 12 months away, 18 months away, 24 months away, we say that a lot to our clients is to start early, because things take time.”

Finance leaders should prepare their organizations now for expected boosts to financing capacity and confidence that more Fed interest rate cuts will bring, so that they “can move quickly once conditions stabilize,” according to Gentry.

“CFOs and their teams should proactively plan for longer timelines, model scenarios of impacts to tariffs and talent costs, and structure agreements to share risks more effectively,” she said. “These help maintain certainty in deals and speed up the closing process.”

The factors behind M&A’s big September comeback

There’s a lot of pent-up demand and macro conditions have improved.

Now that it’s officially pumpkin spice season, the urge to start looking toward 2026 is kicking in.

But as with any forecast, we’ve got to start with the current mood before we jump into next year.

 survey showed that CFOs were slightly more optimistic in Q3, the second quarter in a row when sentiment rose.

The confidence in current and future business conditions rose from 5.4 in Q2 to 5.7, “solidly in medium territory,” but just one in five respondents to the survey described the country’s economy as in good shape, and 8% thought it was bad or very bad.

“I think there continues to be a lot of uncertainty emanating from a lot of different spheres, whether it be policy, geopolitics, or capital markets,” Steve Gallucci, Deloitte global and US CFO program leader, told CFO Brew. “CFOs have become adept at managing through uncertainty. So that’s not anything new.”

However, even though CFOs were less than enthused about the current macroeconomic climate, many remained bullish on their own companies. The vast majority (90%) believed their companies’ financial outlook had improved compared with three months ago.

Many remained risk-averse in Q3. In fact, 65% said it was not a good time to be taking on more risk, a slightly lower percentage than last quarter. The financial sector CFOs, however, were more skittish, with 77% not wanting to take on more risk at the moment.

The CFO Signals survey was conducted from September 3–17 with 200 CFOs from the US, Canada, and Mexico whose companies had at least $1 billion in revenues.

. Now that we’ve taken the current temperature, let’s look to next year. According to another 

 on budget assumptions, CFOs are looking at 

 and reining in selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) budgets to prepare for next year’s 

According to Deloitte, the majority of finance chiefs it surveyed (86%) expected their organizations to place increased emphasis on pricing over the next 12 months. That’s a continuing trend, as 95% of the respondents had already “entirely, significantly, or somewhat” changed pricing strategies in the past six months. As Deloitte noted, US companies are facing the highest average effective tariff rate since 1934.

Nearly half of the CFOs surveyed said they’d pass at least some costs on to customers. But 54% said quickly adjusting prices is difficult since “their organizations lack a cohesive strategy or plan.”

On the budgeting side, Gartner’s budget assumptions survey reported that 64% of CFOs were “planning for their SG&A budgets to grow more slowly than their 2026 revenue growth rate.” Gartner’s survey collected data from 142 CFOs and finance executives between August and September of this year.

“CFOs are signaling that operational efficiency, not just revenue growth, will define success in the coming year,” Randeep Rathindran, distinguished VP of research in Gartner’s Finance practice, said in a statement. “A focus on SG&A discipline reflects a concerted effort to right size overheads even as organizations pursue top-line expansion.”

CFOs are planning to reduce budgets for human resources, corporate IT, legal and compliance, corporate finance, and marketing, according to Gartner’s study.

And of course, we can’t get out of an article without mentioning AI. Gartner reported that 42% of CFO respondents predicted AI would drive a reduction in headcount for these SG&A functions; a third expected reductions of between 1% and 5%.

CFOs are slightly more optimistic, focusing on pricing and operation costs in 2026.

It’s that time of year…when we start thinking more about the next one.

So you’re saying sluggish growth may lie ahead? CFOs have a plan for that!

 report, the International Monetary Fund predicted global growth will slow from 3.3% last year to 3.2% this year and 3.1% in 2026. While the IMF still expects growth to decrease, the 

 from April when the group said to expect growth of only 2.8% this year and 3% in 2026. New trade deals lessened the sting of US tariffs, the IMF noted in its report, yet “the overall environment remains volatile.”

“CFOs have already priced this growth slowdown to some extent” because of the earlier prediction, Randeep Rathindran, distinguished VP in Gartner’s finance practice, told us. With macroeconomic factors in mind, many are still expecting growth but also plan to control expenses.

 of 142 CFOs found that more than two-thirds of respondents anticipated organic revenue growth in excess of 5% next year, according to Rathindran. But they’re also showing cost discipline. Nearly two in three planned for their selling, general and administrative (SG&A) budgets to increase more slowly than revenue growth. Thus, Gartner predicts that growth next year will be “headcount neutral,” he said.

Gartner recommends that CFOs plan for multiple economic scenarios next year, Rathindran said.

They should, for one, ponder what it would mean for business if tariffs cause a spike in inflation, he said. In fact, finance leaders said this is already happening. According to a recent survey from Duke University and the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and Atlanta, CFOs estimated “tariffs are to blame for about one-third of their companies’ price growth this year,” 

CFOs should also plan out a scenario where inflation is muted, but consumer sentiment 

. Other variables, like continued investments in AI or added geopolitical instability, could further influence what’s in store next year, Rathindran added.

“I think the main story here is the continued focus on cost discipline,” he said, “despite some optimism around growth.”