Third annual Strategic CFO Study finds 40% of CFOs rank AI as top growth investment area; 90% look to mastering spend management as key to success in tumultuous times
FOSTER CITY, Calif., May 19, 2025 -- Amidst global economic uncertainty, rising inflation, and volatile trade, AI investment ranked as the top strategy for growth across all global CFOs surveyed by Coupa – a potential panacea to the volatility they are facing.
The Strategic CFO Report: Turning Global Market Uncertainty into Opportunity, released today by Coupa, the leading AI-native total spend management platform, reveals that almost half (46%) of CFOs see prominent external threats – geopolitics and supply chain disruption – as the greatest risk to business, dampening optimism from the start of 2025. Most notably, the introduction of new tariffs has created an additional challenge for 42% of CFOs, with more than a quarter (28%) of US CFOs planning to or already increasing inventory levels in preparation.
"Today's finance leaders are facing an alarming set of external pressures and are navigating an ever changing set of risks which challenges their decision making. Despite these dynamic forces, they are driving cost discipline in order to fuel growth, building more resilient supply chains, and scaling their use of AI to fuel more efficient organizations," said Michael Agresta, Coupa's CFO. "A unified spend management platform and strategy is proving to be mission-critical in these times to create the agility, visibility, and resilience leaders need to fuel sustainable growth. Coupa's AI-driven total spend management platform is uniquely built to help our customers navigate uncertainty, and offers CFOs the cloud and AI-native tools to drive margin improvements in any economic environment, making it a critical component for a strategic CFO's tech stack."
Tariffs Spur Margin Erosion Concerns
With 69% of CFOs concerned about meeting year-end goals, and 40% reporting extreme concern, it's clear that much of the financial optimism at the start of the year has dissipated. Most recently, new tariffs and the fear of global trade wars have driven CFOs to act urgently – including increasing inventory levels (22%), automating processes to reduce operating expenses (21%), engaging in hedging strategies (19%), increasing product pricing (19%), and restructuring supply chain (18%). When surveyed on the greatest external threats to business, U.S. CFOs reported slightly lower concern levels (40%) on tariffs compared to their European counterparts, with German CFOs (48%) indicating the highest concern of all countries surveyed.
CFOs Looking to AI to Fuel Growth and Confidence
Despite the uncertain state of the economy, CFOs are asking themselves how best to respond. For today's finance leaders, this means not over-reacting to every market fluctuation and instead providing thoughtful and inspired leadership – moving away from short-term fixes and prioritizing durable, sustainable growth strategies. A majority (74%) of CFOs are growing increasingly confident in AI, ranking it as the top growth investment area (40% of all CFOs) and AI implementation confidence concerns dropped 23% year-over-year.
"CFOs, including myself, are increasingly championing AI use within their organizations, but to do so effectively they must create a governance structure that is capable of quantifying the performance and financial benefits of AI. Nearly a quarter (23%) of CFOs we surveyed identified this as one of the major obstacles they will face in the next year," said Agresta. "Beyond the numbers, CFOs need to strategically consider how to prioritize the deployment of new AI strategies and tools across their organizations to identify the highest value use cases but also need to empower employees to think AI first in order to get enterprise-wide adoption."
Drowning in Data, Struggling in Silos
In case the state of the economy and trade turmoil wasn't challenging enough, risk management continues to increase organizational complexity, as 1 in 4 CFOs cited cybersecurity threats, data breaches, and fraud as the largest obstacle they will face this year. CFOs have immense amounts of data at their fingertips – but only 28% of CFOs can access their spend data within a single system and nearly half (41%) struggle to react quickly to cut costs as part of this roadblock. Some organizations are modernizing their data management, but few (33%) have unified processes to manage spend comprehensively. Nearly 1 in 5 CFOs cited outdated systems and data silos as the main hurdles to digital transformation, highlighting the need for increased modern tech adoption to effectively manage data and decrease risk.
Read the full Coupa Clarity Report, The Strategic CFO: Turning Global Market Uncertainty into Opportunity here.
To learn more about Coupa's leading total spend management platform can help during these turbulent times, visit coupa.com.
Methodology
Coupa Clarity reports provide unique data and insights to help business leaders make smarter decisions to fuel growth, drive efficiency and productivity, and improve performance. This survey was conducted among 500 CFOs and finance leaders across the US, UK, Ireland, France and Germany. The survey was carried out online with an email invitation between November and December 2024 by Wakefield Research on behalf of Coupa.
About Coupa
Coupa is the leader in AI-native total spend management. Using its trusted, community-generated, $8 trillion dataset, Coupa brings autonomous AI agents, a network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers, and leading apps together on one unified platform to seamlessly automate the buying process and connect to customers in a whole new way. With Coupa, you'll make margins multiply™. Learn more at coupa.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
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