Finance professionals expect artificial intelligence (AI) to significantly disrupt the profession over the next two years, but few feel equipped to harness the full potential of those tools.

New data from the AICPA and CIMA’s Future-Ready Finance: Technology, Productivity, and Skills Survey Report revealed a significant gap between finance professionals’ expectations of AI’s impact and their organisations’ readiness to adopt it.

The majority of respondents (56%) said generative AI has become the most prominent skills gap for their organisations in 2025. Overall, IT/tech skills also emerged as a leading priority (47%) this year, despite being considered a secondary concern (20%) in 2021.

“This highlights a strategic shift towards using advanced technology as a means of enhancing value and efficiency, rather than simply supporting operations,” the survey said.

However, many organisations are still struggling to shift gears. The survey found that while 88% believe AI will be the most transformative technology trend in accounting and finance over the next 12 to 24 months, only 8% said their organisation is “very well prepared” to manage this transformation.

The AICPA and CIMA surveyed more than 1,400 members in senior finance and accounting roles globally in August and September.

The biggest barrier to technology adoption for companies this year was a lack of human capital, skills, and talent (50%), followed by safety and security concerns (47%) and doubts about technology maturity (42%).

“The advance of AI tools in the last two years is enabling a paradigm shift in how finance teams operate and the work they can do to generate value for their organisations,” Andrew Harding, FCMA, CGMA, chief executive–Management Accounting at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, said in a news release. “While professionals recognise the potential on offer, many today feel underprepared and under-skilled. There’s a clear gap between anticipating disruption and taking action.”

To address skills gaps in finance teams, organisations favoured internal training programmes (62%) ahead of external training programmes (45%) and hiring new talent (35%), according to respondents. On-the-job training was ranked the most effective upskilling approach (61%) amongst finance professionals.  

Internal training can be flexible, hands-on, and adaptive, often developing through experimentation and adjustment. But while hiring can be seen as a reactive strategy that does not solve the industry-wide skills shortage, the survey said, it is often a necessary step for driving innovation, especially when internal capabilities are limited.

Other key findings from the survey:

Productivity deficits hold back adoption. Lack of skills (41%) and low motivation (37%) were the top barriers to productivity, the release said, followed by incompatible technology systems and poor coordination in tech implementation (both at 32%).

Skills shortages extend beyond gen AI. Broader technology skills (AI, big data, cloud, Internet of Things, robotics) remain a concern (37%), alongside data and analytics (36%), the release said. Significant gaps also persist in areas such as communication, influencing, and critical thinking (33%) and business partnering (32%).

Learning preferences should guide skills strategy. “The dominance of internal training and the strong preference for on-the-job learning indicate a clear path forward,” the survey said. “Strategic investment must be channelled into practical, accessible, and continuous upskilling programmes and collaborative projects to bridge the readiness gap and unlock productivity gains.”

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.

CHICAGO (WLS) — A Chicago City Council committee approved an alternative budget plan brought by a group of alderpersons on Tuesday.

A group of alderpersons presented the plan, which more than half of city council members are currently supporting, during Tuesday’s Finance Committee meeting.

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The substitute budget ordinance faced scrutiny from supporters of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s budget during the hearing, which lasted several hours.

The alternate budget group is looking to build support for their plan even as they put additional council meetings on the schedule, including meetings this weekend and on Christmas Eve.

The Finance Committee meeting revealed some new revenue options for the 2026 budget proposal and tweaked some others.

It includes raising the plastic shopping bag tax from $0.10 to $0.15, and a pilot program to put advertising on bridge houses as well as light poles.

RELATED | Chicago City Council revises alternative budget proposal, mayor defends head tax as deadline looms

It officially gets rid of the corporate head tax, which has been a major source of contention since Johnson first presented his budget plan. The mayor and his allies are insisting that corporations pay more.

“What you have here is balancing the budget with fines and fees and taking out the corporate head tax. I want to hear your rationale to do that,” said 25th Ward Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez.

“Our proposal, in terms of new revenues, impacts businesses at 84% and individuals at 16%. I want everybody to take a look at this for a minute,” said Budget Committee Vice Chair Ald. Nicole Lee.

The alternative budget group says this plan is 98% in line with Johnson’s. Still, some of his allies were frustrated at not seeing the numbers sooner.

READ MORE | Chicago budget discussions reach stalemate, raising possibility of 1st-ever city government shutdown

“This is our first time reviewing this. This is incredibly disrespectful,” said 35th Ward Ald. Anthony Quezada.

There were also questions about the alternate plan to sell off outstanding debt to raise nearly $90 million. The city comptroller cautioned against it.

“I would say is that I would not. I would not rely on $89 million in this budget. This has never been done by any state,” said Chicago Comptroller Michael Belsky.

But supporters are defending this plan as worthy of consideration calling projections conservative and balanced.

“The group that’s worked on this has spent hundreds of hours bringing in the majority of the city council to talk about this,” said 19th Ward Ald. Matt O’Shea. “We relied on the advice and counsel of budgetary experts.”

The alternative budget plan passed out of finance committee 22-13. Its next stop is the Budget Committee on Wednesday.

It is clear that this breakaway group is flexing its muscle. What’s not clear is what the mayor’s next move will be.

But we now have city council meetings planned for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.

Johnson issued a statement on Tuesday evening, saying, “As the leaders of the Alternative Group made clear throughout their presentation, the Secret Budget that passed out of the Finance Committee this afternoon is substantially similar to the proposal we introduced more than two months ago.

At our insistence, the Alternative Group agreed to restore the cuts they made to youth employment, and they removed the proposal to double the garbage tax. They have finally conceded to some degree, the point that I have made from the beginning: that corporations must pay their fair share in order to protect Chicagoans at this moment.

Unfortunately, at the behest of certain corporate interests, they chose to replace a tax on the largest corporations with $90M+ in “enhanced debt collections” on everyday Chicagoans. This seems to be in direct contradiction with their expressed desires to shift the financial burden away from working people.

Not only is this proposal immoral, it is simply not feasible. There is no way to sell off Chicagoans’ debts that would yield that amount of revenue. If passed as is, this proposal would likely result in a significant midyear budget shortfall and leave Chicagoans vulnerable to deep cuts to city services.

We will spend the next few days with our budget, finance, legal, and policy teams reviewing these proposals. Chicago cannot afford a government shutdown when we are making so much progress growing our economy and reducing violent crime to historic lows.

Tomorrow, the Budget Committee will review their proposal publicly so that Chicagoans can understand exactly what is in this Secret Budget.”

Edwin Mata is CEO & Co-Founder of Brickken.

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In digital finance, we love noise. New apps, tokens, and “disruptive” models get all the airtime. Yet, the real inflection point is unfolding in the most unglamorous corner of the industry: compliance, governance, and record-keeping.

Regulation is not the backdrop to innovation. It is the mechanism through which the sector becomes investable, scalable and credible. Today’s inflection point is defined not by a new consumer product but by whether digital assets can meet the governance expectations that global finance takes for granted.

Regulation as the Moment of Maturity

Traditional finance learned this a long time ago. Modern capital markets only became investable at scale after securities laws in the 1930s forced transparency, continuous disclosure, and enforcement, restoring confidence after catastrophic failures. The US Securities Exchange Act of 1934 didn’t kill markets; it gave them the legal scaffolding to grow into the backbone of global savings.

Crypto and digital assets are now entering a similar “boringly serious” phase. In the EU, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, is designed to give legal clarity to crypto-asset issuers and service providers. For institutional compliance teams, that kind of predictability is far more important than whichever buzzword happens to dominate a conference stage.

The impact on capital flows is already visible: 83% of institutional investors plan to increase allocations to digital assets with regulatory clarity as a key driver of that enthusiasm. Clear rules don’t strangle innovation, they compress uncertainty and lower the risk premium that has kept cautious money on the sidelines.

The Boring Revolution Behind Institutional Capital

That’s why the real story in digital finance is a “boring revolution.” The work that actually matters now is the industrialisation of KYC and KYB, AML monitoring, standardized reporting, on-chain and off-chain reconciliation, governance workflows, and provable rights attached to digital instruments. The industry still loves to obsess over the next shiny app, but the real bottleneck is whether institutions can trust the rails beneath the interface.

RegTech has quietly reframed compliance tooling as an edge rather than a punishment. Technology-driven compliance improves risk assessment, fraud detection, and overall competitiveness because it lets institutions scale digital finance without losing sight of their exposure. That is where the durable upside sits, in making digital assets behave like a serious asset class, not a speculative game with good branding.

From the vantage point of building tokenization infrastructure, the pattern is consistent. When institutions evaluate real-world-asset tokenization, they don’t begin by asking which chain you use or how “decentralized” it is. Their focus is not the chain. It is whether ownership, entitlements, corporate actions and governance can be evidenced, enforced and audited in ways that align with securities law and accounting standards. If those foundations are sound, the rest of the architecture becomes negotiable.

You can see the same shift in where venture money is going. Over 70% of digital asset investment now targets institutional and infrastructure-focused platforms, up from just 27% a decade ago; the funding narrative has pivoted away from consumer speculation toward institutional plumbing. 

That is not a romantic story, but it is the kind that tends to survive more than one market cycle.

From Flashy Apps to Trustworthy Systems

Banks and large asset managers are adjusting their priorities accordingly. Governance, risk management, and compliance modernisation are stressed as core investment themes, especially as new digital-asset rules and prudential standards come into force. Digital finance is being pulled into the centre of regulated balance sheets and internal control frameworks.

At the same time, some institutions now describe digital assets, including tokenized bonds and money-market funds, as a “mainstream subject” for their clients. We explicitly link the shift from fringe to mainstream to better regulatory frameworks and institutional-grade infrastructure rather than retail hype. The catalyst is not design; it is the underlying certainty that these instruments carry governance, accounting treatment and supervisory oversight consistent with established financial products.

This is the narrative inversion digital finance still struggles with. For a decade, the space behaved as if UX, community and tokenomics could overpower everything else. That era produced experimentation, but also a long tail of ungoverned projects that institutional capital simply cannot touch.

If digital finance wants to sit alongside public equities, investment-grade debt and regulated funds, the front end has to be the last question. What matters is whether the system can prove who owns what, under which rules, and with what recourse when things go wrong. That’s the baseline requirement for anyone managing real risk.

Compliance as Product, Not Overhead

The opportunity for fintech founders now is to treat compliance engineering, data governance and risk architecture as core product. The firms that take regulatory expectations seriously, encode them into workflows, and expose them as reliable platforms will become the quiet chokepoints of the next cycle. Regulated entities won’t integrate ten different “innovative” front ends if each one creates a new audit headache; they will integrate the boring rails that make their auditors and supervisors more comfortable, not less.

Collaboration with regulators is becoming central to this shift. Around the world, supervisory authorities are establishing innovation pathways, industry working groups and controlled testing environments that allow technical design and regulatory expectations to evolve together. This model may disappoint purists who prefer unbounded experimentation, but it is the only credible way to align programmable financial systems with the governance, risk and reporting obligations of real-world finance.

The irony is that the least glamorous corner of digital finance is where the most durable value will be created. The “boring revolution” is the recognition that trust, compliance and governance are not obstacles to innovation but the substrate on which the next generation of financial systems will quietly compound.