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,” he said. “It literally means that I hire less over time.”
Similarly, Cory Hrncirik, modern finance leader at Microsoft, told CFO Dive at the Gartner conference that AI is allowing his finance team “to keep up with the almost exponential growth of Microsoft without actually growing our people to match.” AI can “remove inefficiencies,” he said, and give staff “more bandwidth.” (Microsoft laid off around 6,000 people this month, partly due to AI. Hrncirik wasn’t able to say whether any of them were in finance.)
Automation and AI are driving efficiency—and reshaping hiring: Josh Schwartz, CFO of biotech software company Medidata, told CFO Brew that before his company began using the Workday platform for financial management in 2017, his staff were doing a lot of manual work. AP personnel were keying in codes, and T&E staff were manually reviewing expense reports. He describes the latter task as similar to looking for a “needle in a haystack.”
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“If you’re looking at 800 expense reports a week, are you really going to find the one with the problem?” he said.
Within 12 to 15 months of adopting Workday, which incorporates both automation and AI, Medidata had “almost 90%” of its invoices processed through the Workday portal and began using machine learning to review expense reports, Schwartz said.
That’s changed how the finance team hires. Schwartz asks leaders to consider whether the company’s technology can do a job before backfilling a position. “If someone leaves, you don’t hire another person,” he said he tells staff. “You talk me through your team strategy and what skills you’re going to need, how the tools that we’ve purchased…are going to evolve what you need to do.”
Medidata isn’t the only one pursuing that strategy. Axios recently wrote that its leaders ask managers whether AI can do a job before posting any new positions.
“Few want to admit this publicly, but every CEO is or will soon be doing this privately,” columnists Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen claimed.
Gartner’s own experts encouraged attendees to prioritize tech over talent (though perhaps that isn’t surprising, at a conference chock-full of SaaS vendors).
“Instead of deploying business partners to solve problems, we need to make it a habit of deploying business tools,” Gartner senior director and finance data analyst Clement Christensen said during a keynote address.
And by “business partners” he means you organic life forms. “We’re talking about replacing, and in some cases supplementing, the insights of your most expensive finance staff with technology,” he added, a statement that must have taken some chutzpah to deliver before a group of, well, expensive finance staff.