A snapshot of the latest trends for those seeking top finance positions suggests that the demand for artificial intelligence skills grew over the past year, but just how much depended on the position. Also revealed: The CFO role was the only one with rising pay.
Judging by research from Datarails, provider of an FP&A platform for Excel users, much has changed in just a year.
The proportion of CFO job listings in January 2026 that specifically mentioned AI or machine learning skills stayed level compared with January 2025. However, demand for such skills climbed significantly for FP&A leadership roles.
The study analyzed 5,000 job listings across those two Januarys for four specific finance positions: CFO, controller, FP&A leader and accountant. The jobs were advertised on major portals including LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor, Indeed and ZipRecruiter. January was chosen as the month for the snapshot because it’s the peak time of year for job-seeking.
The analysis for January 2026 found that for the four positions combined, one-third (31%) of listings explicitly mentioned AI or machine learning skills. That was up from 25% in 2025.
The Datarails research report cited the language some listings used to communicate their hiring criteria. One asked for a seasoned CFO to “help a business scale into a new phase of growth — leveraging advanced tools, including AI, to drive insight, accuracy and speed.” Another required “an enabler of informed decisions based on predictive analytics, AI usage and real-time data, leading to better efficiency, risk mitigation and opportunity identification.”
Meanwhile, the findings showed that CFO salaries trended upward in the past year, while pay was compressed in other finance roles.
The data was not broken out by company size, but among all the listings analyzed, “lower-range” salaries climbed on average by 9%, January over January, to $176,000. Average so-called “higher-range” salaries were up by 3%, to $219,000.
Controller salaries took a nosedive, collapsing by 21% to $134,000 at the high end, and by 17% to $107,000 at the low end. The salaries of FP&A leaders were down 3% and 1%, respectively, and those of accountants fell by 10% and 3%, respectively.
“The market is concentrating value at the top of the finance function while applying automation pressure to the roles beneath it,” the report said.
Perhaps that’s what is behind another, seemingly odd study finding: The prevalence of problem-solving as a desired trait receded among all four studied positions — by 1.9% for CFO roles, 5.8% for controllers, 5% for FP&A leaders and 5.1% for accountants.
Among other personal skills, demand grew the most for organizational skills — by 15.7% for CFOs, 18.1% for controllers and 12% for accountants.
