Each year, Deloitte publishes a guide to technology trends for CFOs and a separate report on human capital trends for HR leaders. Both tackle the same AI-driven disruption reshaping work in 2026. Both are written for senior leaders under real pressure. And yet the two functions are, in places, solving for different problems while using different languages to describe what is essentially the same moment.
For HR leaders, understanding where these perspectives align, where they partially overlap and where they diverge is a map of where influence battles will be fought.
Where HR and finance see the same thing
The clearest point of agreement is that the hybrid human-AI workforce is an operational reality that demands deliberate design.
Deloitte’s CFO Guide to Tech Trends 2026 describes a workforce in which agentic AI and humans work in tandem to execute finance work, and frames the core human competencies of critical thinking, curiosity and ethics as things that must be actively balanced against new technologies.
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report makes the same argument in a different language, warning that most organizations are still designing work for people and technology separately, rather than designing for both together. It finds that only 14% of leaders say they are “adept” at shaping human-AI interactions.
Both reports also agree on the urgency. The CFO guide notes that 25% of leaders report AI is having a transformative effect on their companies, more than double from a year prior. The Human Capital Trends report describes organizations standing at a tipping point where hesitation carries real consequences.
Both arrive at the same finding about what separates organizations that are getting results from those that aren’t. Organizations taking a human-centric approach to AI are significantly more likely to exceed their return on investment expectations than those focused primarily on technology deployment. Finance and HR are, at least here, reading from the same page.
“Too many organizations treat AI as an adoption problem without first asking how you can achieve the outcomes desired, said Michael Ehret, chief people officer at Walmart International, in Deloitte’s report. “What’s really required is behavioral change—not technical training.”
Where the agreement is partial
The most telling partial agreement involves reskilling and workforce transition. The CFO guide acknowledges the need to develop career pathways for finance talent with AI acumen and calls for evolving ways of working to embed AI processes. It is directionally right. But it stops well short of grappling with what the Human Capital Trends report documents in detail, which is the human cost of constant organizational change.
According to the Human Capital Trends survey, one-third of workers experienced 15 major changes in the past year. The cumulative impact includes decreased wellbeing cited by 68% of workers, increased workload cited by 60% and feeling less relevant or left behind cited by 58%. These numbers do not appear anywhere in the CFO guide. A finance leader building the business case for AI transformation is optimizing for a workforce that HR knows is already strained.
The governance conversation is similarly split. The CFO guide frames shadow AI and inadequate controls on agentic AI primarily as security and financial risks requiring governance, accountability and oversight. That framing is not wrong. But the Human Capital Trends report adds a dimension finance largely misses: Shadow AI is also a culture problem.
When workers use AI tools without employer awareness (41% say they have automated part of their job this way), the organization accumulates what Deloitte’s HR researchers call “cultural debt.” Workers are left to navigate unanswered questions about effort, ownership and accountability on their own. Leaders worry workers are using AI to appear more productive than they are, while workers worry AI will take their jobs anyway.
A governance policy that cracks down on shadow AI without addressing the underlying trust deficit may solve the controls problem while making the culture problem worse. HR leaders have data that finance leaders need before designing those policies.
Where finance has a blind spot
The Human Capital Trends report’s chapter on AI’s cultural debt is the section most absent from most CFO’s field of vision.
A 2025 Gallup poll cited in the HR report found that only 20% of U.S. workers feel strongly connected to their company’s culture. The Edelman Trust Barometer found that trust in employers declined in 2025 for the first time since 2018. And 34% of organizations in the Human Capital Trends survey now recognize culture as a direct inhibitor to their AI transformation goals.
The CFO guide’s treatment of the people dimension of AI transformation focuses on talent pathways and KPIs. It does not engage with the possibility that an organization can execute a technically sound AI strategy and also deplete the trust, belonging and human connection that made the organization function.
The HR report argues that culture becomes a competitive advantage or a liability in the AI era, not incidentally but causally. “Tech won’t solve trust issues,” said Marcia Oglan, CHRO at Highmark Health, in the report. “Only visible, consistent leadership and accountability can do that.”
Organizations that intentionally shape culture around AI adoption are better positioned, say the researchers. Those that allow cultural debt to accumulate quietly risk being undone not by the technology, but by what they failed to tend.
Read more: How CHROs are making AI stick
Where HR has a genuine blind spot
The flow of missed perspective runs in the other direction, too. The CFO guide spends considerable space on what it calls the AI infrastructure reckoning. Researchers describe this as the collision of exploding AI consumption, constrained GPU capacity, volatile tokenomics (token‑based AI usage economics) and monthly AI bills that some organizations are measuring in the tens of millions of dollars.
The Human Capital Trends report is nearly silent on this. HR leaders advocating for human-centered AI design, intentional work redesign and continuous learning infrastructure are making those arguments inside a financial context they may not fully grasp.
The CFO is simultaneously deciding whether to move workloads on-premises, managing inference costs on agentic AI deployments and building governance around a “fail fast” investment culture. Some human-centered design choices are more computationally expensive than others. HR needs to understand the economics well enough to make the case on those terms.
Similarly, the CFO guide points out that human labor may be more cost-effective than agents. This is a significant opening for HR leaders who can model the full cost of displacement, including the cultural and productivity costs the Human Capital Trends report documents. But seizing that opening requires HR to engage on financial grounds, not just people grounds.
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The conversation absent from both reports
Perhaps the most striking finding from reading these two documents together is that both functions are having the same identity crisis at the same time.
The CFO guide asks whether traditional tech roles should sit in finance. The Human Capital Trends report dedicates an entire chapter to asking whether organizational functions have outlived their function, noting that 66% of C-suite leaders believe it is “very or extremely important” to push beyond the boundaries of traditional functions. Notably, Moderna merged HR and IT. Unilever gave its CFO oversight of supply chain, digital technology and business services.
Both reports gesture toward a more integrated future. Neither quite grapples with the practical reality that HR and finance are going to have to design that future together. This will require shared metrics, governance and accountability for what AI does to people and to the balance sheet.
The Human Capital Trends report offers a framing worth borrowing. It describes competitive advantage shifting from what organizations own to how fluidly they can orchestrate capabilities and capacity in real time. Finance sees that shift through the lens of cost and ROI. HR sees it through the lens of talent, culture and work design. The reports suggest that both lenses are necessary.