By Alexei Alexis, Contributor at CFO Dive

Dive Brief:

• Nearly one in three corporate finance job postings now explicitly reference artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities, up from one in four a year ago, finance software provider Datarails said in a report released Tuesday.
• The research analyzed 5,000 job listings for CFOs, financial planning and analysis professionals, controllers and accountants between January 2025 and January 2026. The positions were advertised on major job portals including LinkedIn, Careerbuilder, Glassdoor, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter.
• “This data confirms what we see every day working with finance teams: AI is not replacing the CFO’s Office, it is redefining it,” Datarails CEO Didi Gurfinkel said in a press release. “The finance professionals who will thrive are those who combine AI fluency with strategic thinking and the ability to tell a compelling story with data.”

Dive Insight:

The study comes just a day after Gartner reported that CFOs face mounting challenges in building AI-ready teams. The research firm found in a recent survey that acquiring and developing AI and digital talent is finance chiefs’ top near-term challenge.

“CFOs will find hiring AI and digital talent to meet their top challenge is not easy, and it’s expensive,” Mallory Bulman, senior director analyst in Gartner’s finance practice, said in a press release. “In the near term, they should focus on upskilling their existing workforce to close digital capability gaps and drive more value from the tools they already own.”

The Datarails report highlighted a few examples of companies that have mentioned AI in a finance job listing, including MH Civil Constructors in Amarillo, Texas, which sought a seasoned CFO “helping a business scale into the next phase of growth — leveraging advanced tools, including AI, to drive insight, accuracy, and speed.”

Meanwhile, Hello Hearts, a health technology company based in Menlo Park, California, posted a senior accountant role focused on identifying and implementing “process improvements, including automation and AI-enabled solutions, to increase efficiency and accuracy.”

Among the four roles analyzed, FP&A had the highest share of postings requiring AI skills, at 43%, up from 33% a year earlier. Accountant roles saw the fastest growth, with AI mentions surging to 30% from 18%, while CFO postings remained flat at 27%.

Demand for less traditional skills such as storytelling and partnership building is also rising, alongside increasing compensation at the CFO level, Datarails said.

CFO lower-range salaries climbed 9% year-over-year to $176,000, with upper-range salaries rising 3% to $219,000. However, the CFO category was the only area where compensation increased. Controller upper-range salaries, by contrast, collapsed 21%, from $170,000 to $134,000.

“The market is concentrating value at the top of the finance function while applying automation pressure to the roles beneath it,” the report said.