As companies large and small develop their AI strategies across the organization, the finance department is lagging behind in terms of adoption. A new study shared exclusively with Forbes from leadership advisory firm Egon Zehnder found that while AI is considered critical to 72% of companies’ overall strategies and 68% of financial organizations’ performance, only 3% have integrated AI within their finance departments. The vast majority are either in the early implementation/soon-to-integrate phase—48%—or exploring concepts—40%.

“CFOs are clear-eyed about AI’s promise, but they’re equally aware that getting there will take time,” Arun Dhingra, global head of Egon Zehnder’s CFO & Audit Chair Practice, said in a statement. “We see finance leaders taking thoughtful, phased approaches when it comes to adopting the technology — focusing on building literacy and capability among their teams so AI can augment human expertise rather than replace it.”

Only 18% of CFOs are not using AI at all, the survey found, and the rest have put it to use in a variety of ways. Nearly two-thirds are using it for data analysis and insights. The second most popular use, from 34% of CFOs, is for accounting automation. The majority of companies have not yet seen a reduction in roles due to AI. Among those that have, 83% have been in the accounting/controller’s office—a place that has seen consistent talent shortages in recent years.

As CFOs are ramping up AI use in their departments, they’re preparing the department and employees for adoption. They’re adapting the technology, familiarizing staff with functions, focusing on proven use cases, and starting to explore adding AI functions to software they already use. They’re building AI capabilities within teams, focusing on in-depth education and training on AI skills for all levels. And they’re hiring candidates who already know how to use AI and are excited about the functionality it can bring to the department.

While this more measured approach to AI adoption may put finance departments behind other divisions of the company, they expect to quickly catch up. Instead of rushing into AI and having functions not work, as well as tasking team members who don’t know what to do with the technology, CFOs want to have a full understanding of what they need out of the systems, how to find the right platforms and get their whole teams ready.

E-commerce will only continue to develop in terms of sophistication—and potential cybersecurity threats. Today at Mastercard RiskX, a cybersecurity event in Rome, Mastercard Chief Services Officer Craig Vosburg talked about e-commerce in 2030, and how Mastercard is preparing to fight future risks—and work with others in the ecosystem to maintain security. I spoke with him before the event, and an excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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ECONOMIC INDICATORS

The initial economic strength seen at the beginning of the year is starting to give way. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that August’s unemployment rate rose to 4.3%—above analysts’ expectations—with just 22,000 nonfarm jobs added, well below the projected 80,000. And private payroll processing firm ADP showed that private sector employment increased by just 54,000 jobs last month, nearly half of the 106,000 jobs added in July. There are now more unemployed workers in the U.S. than job openings.

Job growth has been trending downward. Last week, new revisions to June data actually showed that the U.S. lost 13,000 jobs that month. A Tuesday morning revision that subtracted 911,000 jobs from the tally added in the 12 months ending March 2025. Workers are also not optimistic about the job market. The New York Federal Reserve Bank’s Survey of Consumer Expectations found workers estimated they had a 44.9% probability of finding a new job if they lost their current one—the lowest confidence in the job market since the question was first asked in 2013.

The only potential bright spot for the economy is that the Federal Reserve is more likely to lower interest rates at its meeting next week. According to CME FedWatch, 100% of interest rate traders expect a cut—92% are thinking it will be a quarter point cut, while 8% are banking on a half point slash.

An interest rate cut could be helpful to businesses, but it isn’t necessarily the economic surety needed to drive success going forward. Pervasive unemployment, new tariffs and cautious consumers still add up to a precarious environment. Last week, PwC released its holiday spending outlook, and found that consumers expect to cut back on spending this year for the first time since 2020, writes Forbes senior contributor Joan Verdon. A large majority—84%— expect to reduce overall spending in the next six months. And that means more uncertainty for both businesses and consumers into 2026.

TAXES

President Donald Trump’s “No Tax on Tips” policy was a popular talking point during last year’s campaign, and it became law with its inclusion in the summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Last week, the administration released some specifics about how the tax deduction will work, as well as a draft list of which professions are eligible. Forbes’ Kelly Phillips Erb writes that the policy is for tax years 2025 through 2028, and is limited to $25,000 of qualified, reported tips. The law says the deduction is for workers in industries that “customarily and regularly received tips.”

The draft list includes some of the more obvious tipped positions: Restaurant waitstaff, bartenders, casino dealers, hotel staff, barbers and cosmetologists, spa professionals, musicians, caddies, drivers and babysitters. But there are also some who aren’t traditionally tipped: Home maintenance workers, plumbers, electricians, movers, bakers, digital content creators and personal care employees for the elderly. Nothing is final, however, until the full list is published in the Federal Register.

BIG DEALS

After a hiatus caused by an unsure economy, it’s once again IPO season. On Wednesday, buy-now-pay-later giant Klarna plans to debut on the stock market, writes Forbes senior contributor Peter Cohan. The Sweden-based company is seeking a total valuation of $14 billion, which is substantially less than its all-time peak worth of $45.6 billion in June 2021. However, quite a lot has happened in the last four years, and Klarna’s finances have rebounded. Even as the economy continues to slow, Cohan writes that Klarna’s business might continue to grow; people may be more likely to use BNPL to make more purchases.

While Klarna begins trading this week, it isn’t the only interesting player planning to go public. Forbes’ Julie Goldenberg writes that home equity lender Figure is eyeing a $4.1 billion valuation in an IPO. The company offers a marketplace for home equity loan originators to sell loans on the blockchain, as well as makes home equity loans, some which are backed by cryptocurrency.

Ticket reseller StubHub also plans to make its IPO, looking at a potential market cap of more than $9 billion. According to a filing with the Security and Exchange Commission this week, the company plans to sell more than 34 million shares of common stock at a price of $22 to $25 per share.

OFF THE LEDGER

How Mastercard Prepares Today For The Commerce—And Risks—Of Tomorrow

At today’s Mastercard RiskX event in Rome, among sessions about cybersecurity, fraud and future strategies, Mastercard Chief Services Officer Craig Vosburg discussed the future of e-commerce and fraud detection by painting a picture of what a transaction—and the risks associated with it—will look like in 2030. At the conference, Mastercard announced On-Demand Decisioning, a new security solution that enables financial institutions to customize the factors in its authorization decisions.

I spoke with Vosburg before the event about how Mastercard is planning for e-commerce in the future and working through the challenges of the present. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.

In your address, you mention that the e-commerce world of 2030 will be underpinned by a frictionless web of billions of linked devices, autonomous agents and accounts that communicate with one another. How close are we to that reality right now?

Vosburg: We are at the early stages. Agents exist, agents are proliferating, agents are primarily being used today for search-oriented kinds of activities, but are also increasingly available to perform role-specific tasks, not just for consumers, but for businesses. For example, for the CFO of a small business or the procurement officer in a corporation, agents can help streamline, simplify and increase efficiency associated with that work.

We are on the cusp of seeing agent searches turn into commerce, where there’s the completion of a transaction at a consumer’s behest. In a subsequent phase, we will see a shift from consumer-to-agent oriented instructions to agent-to-agent oriented instructions, where we start to see this proliferation of agentic activity across environments, merchant domains, business domains. And then from there, we’ll see things scale pretty rapidly.

As e-commerce gets more automated, it gets more convenient for the consumer, but there are also more places for bad actors to penetrate transactions and perpetuate fraud. What is Mastercard doing right now in terms of new threat detection and both customer and consumer protection?

There’s a pretty wide array of things that we’re investing in to help in that regard.

Related to identity verification, both broadening how we’re able to authenticate identity and broadening the array of entities that we’re identifying. For example, moving from transaction-oriented attributes that would enable identification or authentication of the validity of a transaction to a broader array of identity attributes—email addresses, phone numbers, devices through which you commonly engage, etc.

To develop a broader and more dynamic means of assessing the authenticity of an individual’s identity becomes increasingly important in a future where commerce may be conducted through agentic AI. To authenticate the identity of the person who’s instructing the agent to transact on their behalf becomes an important part of the future of commerce as well. But we’re also investing to broaden the array of entities that we can identify. Consumers become very important because devices are the entryway into a lot of these transaction initiation opportunities, [as well as] identifying businesses more effectively, and ultimately identifying agents.

There’s another area where we’re investing: to enhance our ability to identify and authenticate the validity of businesses that are engaging and transacting on the network. Expanding digital commerce [includes the threat of] fraudulent or nefarious activity that’s perpetrated by organized crime—state actors, in some places—taking identities and stolen credentials. Part of how those things find their way into perpetrating fraud is establishing fraudulent merchant sites that can test the credential to see if it’s still working. I’ve stolen your card information. I need to find out if it’s still active. I go to what’s basically a front that’s a merchant site to be able to test and see if the transactions or the credential are still active.

One of the things we’re investing in is a merchant risk assessment capability to have greater visibility into identifying who are legitimate, who are fraudulent merchants.

You can combine that with insights that we’re able to gather through some of the investments we’ve made in cybersecurity assets. Recorded Future as an example: That’s a threat intelligence capability giving us insight into actual stolen credentials that are circulating on the dark web. We can triangulate where and how some of these things are appearing and being used, and use that information to shut down fraudulent merchant sites, to alert others in the ecosystem to what credentials or what identities may have been compromised. All of which play an important role in protecting the integrity of our network today, but will increasingly play an even broader role in the future in the world of commerce.

The future of e-commerce is something that Mastercard is working on, but you said you’re looking for an entire community of different players and work together. What are you looking for from other organizations, and what should CFOs today be thinking about?

What we’re looking for, particularly as it relates to cybersecurity, is the importance of collaboration and partnership within the ecosystem. I think that importance is elevated, both given some of the trends we’ve just been discussing around technology and the speed at which it’s evolving.

It is becoming a more fragmented world geopolitically. A little bit less coordination being provided through the public sector, in many cases, underscores the importance, particularly for those of us who operate within a given ecosystem, to partner and collaborate; align on understanding of where there are opportunities and risks; align on principles around how we manage those most effectively to continue to deliver great experiences for our collective customers; and invest in the capabilities, the technology, the platforms, the data sharing that will enable us to collectively deliver on that promise.

There’s no one organization that will be able to address all of the needs to deliver on the promise that these new technologies can provide in the future. We’re very intent upon playing the role that we can as a convener within our ecosystem to bring together the right partners, both in the public sector and the private sector, to work as effectively as we can and make sure that the security aspects advance in lockstep with the creative opportunistic aspects of where and how the technology will be deployed.

CFOs have a lot of things to think about. There’s important things on the commercial side of where and how some of these technologies will impact their business. In some cases, where and how technology and AI’s always-on connectivity can enhance efficiency and help them increase productivity; potentially reduce costs.

[There are] really important implications for CFOs of businesses who are selling goods and services to ensure that they have a roadmap for enabling their goods and services to be discoverable in a world where agents are doing the searching. How do you take that inventory of goods and services that you provide and make sure that large language models out there, scouring the world for information to synthesize find your stuff?

On the security side of things, cybersecurity-related risks are significant events for any business. For small businesses, they’re often existential events. Thinking about where and how to best protect the enterprise in a world where the attack surfaces are proliferating because of the connectivity of devices, the risks that exist within any given business’s supply chain, the partners that they engage with, and the interconnectivity of technology between partners at a supply chain are top-of-mind considerations for any CFO. The thing to focus on is understanding where and how the technology is moving. Who are some of the key partners to be able to work with to best inform an organization on how to protect themselves against some of those risks, and how they can work to ensure that to the extent the risk profile continues to expand, they’re managing it as effectively as they can? Identification of risks is the first step in helping to mitigate or eliminate those risks.

COMINGS + GOINGS

• Casual shoe brand Crocs appointed Patraic Reagan as its new executive vice president and chief financial officer, effective September 22. Reagan joins the company from SharkNinja, Inc., where he served as chief financial officer, and he’s also worked in leadership at Nike. He will succeed Susan Healy.
• Workforce solutions firm Employbridge selected Myke Hawkins to be its chief revenue officer, effective September 2. Hawkins previously worked in the same role at Cielo Talent, and has also held leadership roles at U.S. Legal Support and Xerox.
• Restaurant chain Sweetgreen tapped Jamie McConnell for its chief financial officer role, effective September 22. McConnell joins the company from Chipotle, where she served as chief accounting and administrative officer, and she succeeds Mitch Reback, who is retiring.

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

While many companies have the budget to invest in more AI, some aren’t taking action because they don’t know where to start—but are simultaneously feeling under pressure to get AI systems online immediately. It’s best for different departments to work together and be open to experimentation to find the right applications.

Change is constant and leaders need to be able to manage their organizations effectively through whatever happens. However, the best leaders can make their own changes to improve their business. Here are four ways to prepare your business for proactive change.

QUIZ

The U.S. Tax and Trade Bureau announced last week that it would stop doing what in order to follow an executive order from President Donald Trump?

A. Recycling

B. Hiring people who don’t pass a loyalty test

C. Issuing paper checks

D. Having official communication—even for foreign companies—in languages that aren’t English

See if you got the right answer here.