How CFOs are striving to get unstuck from uncertainty

Republican leadership in the US House passed a “big, beautiful” package of tax cuts and spending cuts by a one-vote margin — and it will be rewritten by a Senate with different political and procedural realities. “They have June and July to figure this out with all the parts of the bill, particularly on the tax side and many other areas,” Beeman said. If left unresolved, a fight about the debt ceiling looms. Sore points include rolling back green-energy provisions in the Biden administration’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, the state and local tax deduction and the overall impact on the deficit.

CFO roundtable participants were about evenly divided on what part of the bill is most relevant to them, highlighting its overall importance: with a slight edge, a third of our cohort cited international tax provisions such as Section 899. “What we need out of this and on tariffs is certainty,” one CFO said. “It’s so difficult making decisions in this environment, and we’ve shared that with the administration. This bill has major implications on our decisions.”

“It’s the uncertainty and volatility driving the discussion, and not really the cost impact, which is taking longer to materialize,” Daco said. “That’s the flip of what we were expecting after the election.” He said that extending the provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 acts as a conundrum for lawmakers because it maintains the status quo at a large cost, while not extending them would likely drag the economy into a recession. Other provisions, like eliminating the tax on tips, have a limited stimulative effect only on certain sectors.

To deal with stubbornly high interest rates, CFOs said they were securing a combination of the 10-year fixed rate and some swaps, or three- and five-year hedges, or shifts into variable rate debt.

Courts have rebuked the administration for tariffs implemented under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but there are other levers to pull, such as Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. “The outcome can be tough, but with more transparency, that helps business in the long run,” Neill said. “With Section 232, you can be more engaged in the process.”

CFOs are prepared to deploy several tactics in response to tariffs, with 67% of participants saying they’d pass through costs and 50% exploring domestic sourcing alternatives and rebuilding local supply networks.

• US-China blocs harden: US and China keep tariffs on each other while the EU and others agree to work with the US to limit Chinese imports. Emerging markets engage in trade with both blocs.
• US stands alone: US and China keep tariffs on each other. The US un-pauses “reciprocal” tariffs that go into full effect. The EU and China agree on a framework for mutually beneficial trade.
• Protectionism proliferates: The US and China keep tariffs on each other while US negotiations with other country and the EU fail. US trading partners impose retaliatory tariffs, while the EU imposes barriers on Chinese imports and China retaliates.
• The grand bargain: The US and China agree to remove bilateral tariffs as part of larger negotiation on multiple issues. The US and other key trade partners reach bilateral deals to reduce or eliminate tariffs.

But aside from the specifics, CFOs are watching the general strength of the economy. “Everything has slowed down,” one executive said. “But is there a next leg? We’re seeing investment decisions on the next leg rather than just tariffs and supply chains, which we know will be uncertain for a while. The cloud about the economic outlook is a fairly large cloud.”

Daco echoed that sentiment, although he does not predict a recession in the US. “We have to look at all the factors that supply our economy — trade, tax, immigration — that are influencing how much we can produce and at what cost,” he said. “They’re inflationary, and they weigh on demand via the supply side. That’s a paradigm that we’re heading to and that we’re not accustomed to.”

While controllers are excited about agentic AI, most of today’s use cases are more evolutionary than revolutionary. Representing some of the biggest companies in the world, CFOs who took part in the roundtable largely had the same message: They needed more time to resolve foundational data issues, and many were already in multiyear transformations and were trying to evolve midflight.

“With GenAI, I saw surveys where most companies are in a piloting phase, and that’s where we are: broader company-wide initiatives relative to prospects on productivity gains and growth,” a CFO said. “A lot of it is data. How do we get data from all these ERPs?”

“There’s no shortage of areas across the business to create savings to invest in AI, but the discussion on what to do with the money — the actual use cases — gets quieter,” another added. “I want to connect it to workforce planning to slow hiring in areas where you’re exploring and implementing.”

This conversation recalled the early days of the internet as it entered the mainstream in the 1990s. Did you know what to do with an internet browser? Was it immediately apparent to you how connectivity would enter your life and change society and business? It probably seemed like a vaguely powerful diversion from the normal course of the world. It’s easy to see the potential of GenAI and agentic AI but harder, so far, to realize it and place it into a future context.