CFOs look to optimize costs in 2026 but also want to invest in growth, survey says

CFOs are being asked to balance a lot in 2026. Cut costs, save money, and grow the business all at the same time. According to Dennis Gannon, VP analyst with Gartner, these top three concerns—cost optimization, improved cashflow, and capital growth investment—are “all pulling at a tension with each other” and putting pressure on CFOs.

“It’s a really challenging environment for CFOs,” Gannon told CFO Brew, “to be tasked with fairly aggressive growth goals for 2026, but also not taking any kind of a pass on the cost optimization gains and the financial strength that they’ve been focused on building here in 2025.”

Cutting costs. The volatile market seems to be weighing heavily on some CFOs, pushing them to be financially conservative and enter 2026 with cautious financial plans. According to Gartner’s 2026 CFO Agenda report, the top concern for CFOs going into next year was cost optimization. Over half (56%) of more than 200 CFOs surveyed in August put it in their top five priorities.

“There’s so much still residual uncertainty right now in the economy and in various industry segments that those long-term investments are just hard for CFOs to make with confidence right now,” Gannon said.

Taking advantage. However, as much as CFOs want to keep costs low, another subset emerged from the Gartner survey. Some are looking to take advantage of the turbulent ecosystem by investing in new growth opportunities—15% of the CFOs listed “allocating capital to new growth opportunities” as their top priority and 47% had it in their top five.

Moving quickly when others are slowing down could springboard these companies out in front of competitors for the long run.

“The ability to restore capex at the bottom of a trough being really strongly correlated with winners,” Gannon said.

But according to Gannon, only 5% to 10% of companies will successfully outperform the competition on both cost and growth at the same time.

“It’s really hard to do both simultaneously,” he said. “That requires some real financial discipline and financial management practices.”

AI performance anxiety. Of course, CFOs will still be talking about AI in 2026. But the really juicy gossip is that they’re insecure about it. Finance chiefs lack confidence in their AI initiatives, Gartner found. Barely more than a third (36%) feel prepared to steer their organizations toward AI success. And even when focused solely on their finance teams, still less than half (44%) believe they can accelerate adoption. But according to Gannon, it’s not because they don’t have confidence in the technology.

“It’s more of an accountability problem internally,” he said. “It’s more of a problem of ‘we don't have good business cases around it. We don’t have good KPIs around it.’ A lot of shorter term uncertainty about how exactly we’re going to derive the business benefits, and then track and verify those benefits.”