AI magnifies the importance of bonding with tech execs

It’s the biggest relationship story of 2026—yes, even bigger than Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce tying the knot at MSG. Well, at least finance executives might agree.

The working relationship between CFOs and their technology counterparts in the C-suite is going through changes in the midst of the AI revolution, according to experts who spoke with CFO Brew.

“That relationship has always been tight and close because it has to be,” according to Kevin Carmody, senior partner at McKinsey. The CFO’s need for good data and integrated systems, both in the technology chief’s wheelhouse, didn’t spring up only after AI, he explained.

As CFO Brew reported in the quaint year of 2024, CFOs with their “investment mindset” and their tech peers with their “technology strategy mindset” have always put their heads together to help guide their companies’ technology spending so that it supports business objectives.

But AI has brought on new challenges for both the finance and tech functions, including how to manage token spend, Carmody said. Finance execs also lean on their CIOs or chief data officers to think about how agents can automate certain job functions.

“I think the relationship between technology and the finance organization has, rightfully so, changed, but it’s also accelerated,” he said.

Aligning. Scott Grossman, CFO of IT solutions company Ensono, said working with his tech counterparts, including the CTO, CIO, and chief AI officer (CAIO), starts with a good relationship

“I think I’ve endeared myself to them because I’m so interested in the technology and exploring how it’s used and sharing fun stuff that I’m doing with them, and we’ve just developed a really good rapport, and they want the same thing I do,” Grossman said. “All of our employees are equity holders in the business, which kind of allows us to be on the same wavelength, and they don’t want cost overruns as much as I don’t.”

He and his counterparts try to make “pragmatic” AI spending decisions. AI tokens are “kind of a black box right now,” which makes it difficult to estimate how many tokens an AI agent will consume, Grossman told us. There may be more predictability in the future, but for right now, the only certainty on token spend comes once the agent is up and running. And that doesn’t sit well with cost-conscious CFOs like Grossman.

Indeed, Ensono has “caps in place on a user level” to avoid any spending surprises, but there’s built-in flexibility, according to Grossman.

“If someone hits their cap, we’re able to say, ‘Let’s look at specific use cases,’” he explained. If the employee is developing a useful tool and “we know the business case associated with this, great; we’ll increase their cap.”

Getting support. To drive AI transformation inside the finance department, Grossman elevated a former technology person who had switched to finance and was running vendor management.

“I went to our CEO. I said, ‘I think he can help drive transformation for most of the SG&A functions, so finance, HR, and legal.’” But Grossman realized he also needed to get the OK from Ensono’s chief AI officer—the employee was “kind of doing stuff on the side,” he said, so he was not reporting to the CAIO. In addition, Grossman needed “to get buy-in from our CIO, our CTO. Because we have such a great relationship,” the company’s chief AI officer “was incredibly supportive,” he said, “putting this gentleman in the role, reporting to me…Finance needs to be in the conversation around AI for cost management reasons, but also, there’s a lot that we can be doing as a finance function to improve our processes.”