After watching expertise get scarcer over the previous a number of years, finance and accounting leaders are rethinking the way in which their groups work.
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Till this 12 months, most CFOs tried to resolve the accounting expertise scarcity by doubling down on hiring methods that yielded diminishing returns. This 12 months, in keeping with survey knowledge collected from finance and accounting resolution makers, essentially the most agile finance leaders have moved on from that method. As an alternative, these leaders are redesigning the way in which their finance and accounting groups work to adapt to longer hiring timelines, increasing workloads, and the CFO’s new function as a key contributor to organization-wide technique.
The outcomes of 2026 Finance and Accounting Expertise Market Outlook survey describe an rising hybrid finance working mannequin designed to flex and scale in tandem with capability necessities. Leaders who embrace this new method can do greater than shut their staffing gaps. They will create worth for the group in new methods.
The rising capability hole in finance and accounting
The finance and accounting expertise survey revealed that throughout industries and group sizes, there’s now a median of 17 open accounting and finance roles at corporations. That is greater than triple the common variety of unfilled seats in 2025. Because of this shortage, 42% of finance leaders mentioned their group wants 60 or extra days to fill open roles. That lengthy hiring timeline typically represents work that is being postponed or added to different staff’ plates.
The slowdown of latest expertise getting into the pipeline is not the one issue within the scarcity. Many current staff are ageing out or leaving early. For instance, three quarters of U.S. CPAs working towards in 2020 hit retirement age that 12 months. Subsequent up is Era X, whose members vary in age from mid-40s to early 60s. Almost 70% of this cohort desires to retire early. With out strategic succession planning, corporations danger shedding these staff’ institutional data as they retire. When corporations lose senior staffers’ data and expertise, they will additionally lose the type of insights that assist CFOs develop value-creation methods to share with the C-suite and the board.
Creating worth with a hybrid finance and accounting workforce
After years of survey knowledge indicating that CFOs have been hesitant to make use of AI in accounting and finance workflows, 2026 marks a significant shift of their pondering. In 2025, simply 23% of survey respondents mentioned their organizations have been utilizing AI and automation to deal with headcount challenges. This 12 months, 63% mentioned they’re utilizing these applied sciences “to scale back the necessity to fill roles,” whereas 26% are utilizing automation and AI for higher effectivity with out changing jobs.
Greater than 90% of leaders surveyed at corporations with greater than 5,000 staff are actually utilizing a mix of AI and automation plus outsourcing to scale back hiring strain and fill open roles with high-quality expertise in areas the place it is extra plentiful. This hybrid method that blends conventional hiring, outsourcing, AI and automation represents a brand new mannequin for filling capability gaps, and it has the potential to create other forms of worth.
Combining AI and automation for high-volume, extremely standardized duties permits finance leaders to allocate extra of their finances to outsourcing to fill open roles and to hiring in-house expertise. The power to outsource as wanted additionally lets leaders scale their finance and accounting groups up or down relying on workload for price optimization. The survey discovered that 36% of corporations utilizing AI and automation have diminished their finance working prices by 11 to twenty%. One quarter of corporations have seen price reductions of 21 to 30%. At 85% of corporations with greater than 5,000 staff, leaders reported finance working price reductions of greater than 30% utilizing automation and AI.
Hybrid workforce advantages transcend price financial savings. When AI handles rote duties and outsourcing handles accounts payable and related processes, inner groups can spend extra time understanding the group to establish extra alternatives for course of enchancment and financial savings. This may also help CFOs meet their most urgent priorities, as outlined in a latest Deloitte report: planning for exterior challenges, increasing income streams, optimizing money allocation and movement, and lowering prices.
Constructing and scaling a hybrid F&A workforce
Making a hybrid workforce begins with understanding which duties might be dealt with by AI and automation and which open roles might be crammed with outsourced expertise. Outline the duties you need your in-house staff to give attention to as soon as they’re much less overloaded, to your planning functions and to forestall them from getting anxious as duties get automated or outsourced.
Subsequent, develop a timeline to your shift so implementation is clean and sources aren’t wasted. For instance, AI and automation is perhaps essentially the most cost-effective place to start out, however they might additionally include cybersecurity and compliance necessities that add prices and delay deployment. Outsourcing is commonly the simplest first step as a result of the trade’s processes and guardrails are well-established. As duties transfer out of your in-house staff to AI or outsourced staff, staff might have coaching for brand spanking new duties like performing because the “human within the loop” to evaluation the outcomes of automated processes or analytics to floor insights from operational knowledge.
These steps do not should occur concurrently or throughout the entire group without delay. It is best to pilot AI and course of automation initiatives earlier than scaling them up so you may establish and repair points whereas they’re nonetheless small. Over time, as you evaluation your hybrid workforce’s KPIs and as AI capabilities develop, you might need to “rebalance” your hybrid mannequin by automating new duties, outsourcing completely different roles and investing extra in growing expertise in home.
Constructing a hybrid workforce now additionally builds some benefits that opponents could battle to match as expertise stays scarce and AI capabilities enhance. Workers who get to do difficult work and may see a transparent connection between their work and firm outcomes usually tend to keep engaged and fewer more likely to depart. Corporations that begin climbing the AI automation studying curve now can be sooner to capitalize on new options as extra highly effective fashions are launched. And leaders who can optimize workforce prices and leverage expertise for technique growth present extra worth to the group.
