A CFO we placed last year described the current AI moment as ‘building the plane while flying it and also being asked to calculate the fuel efficiency mid-air’. The Avalara survey puts numbers to that feeling: finance leaders are being pushed to demonstrate agentic AI returns before basic governance questions have answers. Who signs off when an autonomous agent executes a tax decision? Where does accountability sit when the AI flags an exception incorrectly? These are not theoretical concerns for compliance-heavy DACH organisations.
The pressure is coming from boards who see competitors announcing AI initiatives and want visible progress. What boards are slower to grasp is that proving ROI on agentic AI requires measurement frameworks that most finance functions have not built yet. The CFO is caught between ‘show me the numbers’ from above and ‘we do not have the controls’ from the teams who would actually deploy the technology.
We have started to see this tension shape hiring priorities. Clients are adding governance and risk experience to S/4HANA finance searches that previously focused purely on technical migration skills. One client in Frankfurt paused their AI pilot specifically to bring in someone who could design the accountability layer first. That role took us four months to fill because candidates with SAP finance depth plus AI governance experience are concentrated in a handful of large consultancies, and most are not looking to move.
For finance professionals watching from the market, the practical question is whether to build governance expertise now or wait for the frameworks to mature. The CFOs we place are increasingly the ones who can articulate a governance roadmap alongside an AI deployment plan. Technical fluency alone is no longer the full picture for senior finance roles in SAP-driven organisations.
Prompted by reporting from ERP Today.