What implications will a shrinking pool of jobs have on the finance function? What will work look like when so much is automated? CFO Brew will examine these questions in part three of this series. Learn more about why you need to believe the AI hype in part one.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently made a dire prediction: AI will soon eliminate half of all entry-level office jobs. That shift already might be happening in Big Tech, which has hired 50% fewer new grads since the pandemic, in part due to AI advancements, venture capital firm SignalFire reported. Is AI coming for entry-level finance and accounting jobs as well?

As much as it hurts to admit it, the answer may be yes.

During the 2025 Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference, several finance leaders said that, while they weren’t laying people off due to AI, they weren’t planning on growing their finance teams much, either.

Payments software company Brex is growing exponentially, chief accounting officer Erik Zhou told CFO Brew, but due to AI, its finance team isn’t.

“We have the fortune of building out our function while this technology exists right now,” he said. He’s able to “leverage AI to make the current team more productive. It literally means that I hire less over time.”

How secure is your job in the new AI workplace?—CV

Two and half years after the release of ChatGPT, the pace of AI development hasn’t let up much. A constant stream of new enterprise AI tools promises to remake work as we know it across every industry. But how much is generative AI actually moving the needle for companies that use it?

A handful of new reports aims to quantify how much businesses are adopting AI—as well as what they’re getting out of the technology.

As agents are billed as the next big chapter in generative AI, these surveys show many companies are rushing to test them out. But the data on how much all this AI spending has yielded in terms of results is mixed.

Agent uptick: A PwC survey of more than 300 executives in April found that 52% have either broadly or fully adopted AI agents; 27% reported limited usage. The rest of the companies either hadn’t yet adopted agents or had no plans to do so.

The top use cases were customer service, sales and marketing, and IT and cybersecurity. Most companies surveyed said their budgets were increasing because of agentic AI.

But the report authors wrote that while agents provide “a meaningful boost in productivity, [the technology] stops short of transformation.”

How transformative is AI, really?—PK

Some good news, and some existential chaos.

57% of AICPA members got questions answered speedily by the IRS Practitioner Priority Service hotline during the 2025 busy season, up from 37% in 2024, according to an AICPA annual survey.

But 14% of members said they rarely or never got answers right away this tax season, down from 37% in 2024.

Melanie Lauridsen, the AICPA’s VP of tax policy and advocacy, called the IRS hotline “one of the most important things for tax people because, when we have a question, usually the IRS is the only one that can answer it,” at a recent AICPA town hall, the Journal of Accountancy reported. “What we see is the IRS did answer the phone, and there was improvement there.”

But the survey also reflected concerns about the state of the IRS during Trump 2.0, which has already meant steep staffing cuts and leadership turnover.

Who’s picking up the phone at the IRS?—NP

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The 2007–08 financial crisis rocked Wall Street—and Dodd-Frank changed the rules forever. This article breaks down how the landmark legislation reshaped corporate finance, compliance, and risk strategy. Read now to understand its lasting impact and what today’s CFOs need to know.