All 2027 Conference Sessions

Gartner Finance Symposium/Xpo 2027 dives deep into key topics for finance around AI, leadership, talent, strategy and more to help you address your organization's mission-critical challenges.

2027 Conference Theme

Orchestrating Enterprise Performance in an AI-First World

This year’s conference theme focuses on how CFOs must lead organizations where people and digital workers collaborate, using real-time insights. As AI risk compounds and pressure to demonstrate value grow, CFOs must unlock capacity, elevate talent and empower teams to drive performance and profitable growth.

Explore our conference sessions below, all developed with this theme in mind.

View track descriptions.

Experience how CFOs and finance leaders gain practical insights, exchange ideas with peers and engage in relevant discussions that help them to strengthen their impact as a finance professionals.
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Monday, 01 March, 2027

10:15 AM - 10:45 AM AEDT

AI Agent Governance 101: A CFOs Guide to Making AI Agents Safe at Scale
Ash Mehta, Sr Director Analyst, Gartner
Most finance organizations are building AI agents faster than they are governing them. For CFOs, this creates a new class of financial, operational and accountability risks that cannot be managed with traditional controls alone. This session provides a practical, 101-level introduction to AI agent governance for CFOs and finance leaders who need a clear starting point, not a technical deep dive. It explains the foundational concepts, vocabulary and governance building blocks required to scale AI agents responsibly, including how to establish policies, monitoring practices, escalation paths and human oversight. The session also explores how finance teams can maintain accountability through effective collaboration between human analysts and AI agents. Attendees do not need prior AI or technical experience. They will leave with a practical framework for understanding where AI agent risks arise, how to organize governance responsibilities and what first steps finance leaders can take now to govern AI agents safely before scale makes the risks harder to unwind. ... Show More Show Less

10:15 AM - 10:45 AM AEDT

Finance 2030: The Finance Workforce at Breakaway Firms
Nadia Bulkin, Director Analyst, Gartner
By 2030, CFOs at the breakaway firms will lead a workforce of digital talent that will regularly build new technology capabilities and accomplish core finance tasks by leveraging AI and tools. As a result, finance will scale and accelerate decision support and help overcome growth anchors. ... Show More Show Less

11:45 AM - 12:15 PM AEDT

3 Strategic AI Mistakes CFOs Are Making Right Now
Geraldine Garaud, Sr Director Analyst, Gartner
The pressure to invest in AI has created a new generation of strategic risks. This session explores three AI strategy mistakes emerging today and the actions finance leaders should take before they become enterprise constraints.

Mistake #1: Treating AI as a Productivity Initiative Rather Than a Business Model Shift
Most organizations justify AI through productivity gains, cost reduction, and automation. While efficiency matters, AI capabilities will increasingly become accessible to everyone. As competitors gain access to similar models, copilots, and agents, sustainable advantage will come not from eliminating work faster but from reimagining how the enterprise creates value. The critical question is: How does AI change the business model, decision-making, and sources of competitive advantage?

Mistake #2: Treating AI as a Technology Investment Rather Than a Capital Allocation Decision
Over the next three years, the most important AI decisions may not be technology decisions at all. Organizations must determine where to invest scarce resources: people or AI, build or buy, centralized or distributed intelligence, efficiency or growth. The winners will not necessarily be those spending the most on AI, but those reallocating capital, talent, and investment priorities the fastest.

Mistake #3: Assuming Governance Is the Primary Constraint
Today, many organizations view AI risk management as the central challenge and are investing heavily in policies, controls, and oversight. Yet the greater challenge may be managing complexity. Enterprises are rapidly moving toward a future with hundreds of AI agents, multiple platforms, distributed decision-making, and blended human-digital workforces. The question evolves from "How do we govern AI?" to "How do we coordinate an enterprise where intelligence is distributed across people, agents, models, and systems?" ... Show More Show Less

11:45 AM - 12:15 PM AEDT

AI Agents will Underperform Because Finance has the Wrong Value Assessment
Twisha Sharma, Sr Principal Analyst, Gartner
Organizations are rapidly deploying AI agents to improve productivity, automate decisions, and accelerate business performance. Yet many CFOs are discovering that agent adoption does not automatically translate into business value. This session explains why traditional software metrics fail to evaluate AI agents, introduces a framework for measuring agent performance, and shows how CFOs can identify which agents to scale, redesign, or retire to maximize value from agentic AI. ... Show More Show Less

11:45 AM - 12:15 PM AEDT

How to Accelerate AI adoption within your Finance Cloud ERP
Irmina Melarkode, Director Analyst, Gartner
This session delivers a blueprint for CFOs to proactively deploy these native capabilities. Learn how to navigate complex new AI pricing structures, align deployments with high-value finance use cases, and actively influence your ERP vendor's product roadmap to secure long-term operational returns. ... Show More Show Less

01:45 PM - 02:15 PM AEDT

AI Productivity Leakage: How CFOs Can Convert Small Efficiencies into Hard-Dollar Returns
Nauman Abbasi, Sr Director Analyst, Gartner
Enterprise AI investments are overwhelmingly justified by projected employee time savings, yet CFOs face a persistent disconnect between theoretical minutes saved and realized financial value. When employees save an average of 5+ hours per week, more than two-thirds of that capacity silently dissipates into informal tasks, administrative sprawl, or "workslop" remediation.

In this session, Nauman Abbasi unpacks the economic mechanics of AI Productivity Leakage and presents a framework to capture phantom capacity. Attendees will explore how to treat AI time savings as a corporate capital asset rather than an unmanaged employee perk, shifting enterprise performance governance from traditional input metrics (hours logged) to output-driven KPIs (quality-adjusted unit output, cost per completed task).

Finance leaders will leave with concrete strategies to convert latent hours into auditable margin expansion, lower operational unit costs, and top-line capacity.

• Surprise / Challenge Assumptions ("Wow Factor"): Challenges the comforting myth that "time saved equals money saved"; directly confronts executives with the reality that unguided AI adoption creates a "phantom capacity trap" where payroll costs stay fixed while diffuse time savings deliver zero accretive bottom-line impact.

• Fresh & Innovative: Introduces quality-adjusted output KPIs and unit-cost economics to replace obsolete 40-hour input tracking, providing CFOs with a playbook to actively reallocate recaptured workforce capacity toward strategic differentiators and revenue velocity. ... Show More Show Less

01:45 PM - 02:15 PM AEDT

The New Finance Architecture Problem: Everything Can Do Everything
Matthew Mowrey, VP Analyst, Gartner
Finance leaders have more technology choices than ever, yet many are less certain than ever about how their architecture should work. Planning platforms now model data. Data platforms now support analytics. Analytics tools now embed AI. AI tools now promise planning and decision support. As capabilities converge, finance teams face a new challenge: determining where business logic, analysis, governance, and decision support should actually live.

This session examines why modern finance architectures are becoming harder, not easier, to design. Learn how leading organizations cut through capability overlap, avoid costly architectural ambiguity, and build a finance technology foundation that is trusted, scalable, and ready for AI-enabled decision making. ... Show More Show Less

01:45 PM - 02:15 PM AEDT

Who Owns What? Navigating Process and Product Ownership in Finance
Tamara Shipley, VP Analyst, Gartner
Finance needs specific roles to advance its digital initiatives and improve processes. Join this session where we'll demystify the differences between process ownership and product ownership, helping you decide when, why and if global process owners and product owners are needed. Learn where both roles deliver value and how to get started in driving process outcomes and success in digital and AI initiatives with process and product ownership. ... Show More Show Less

03:30 PM - 04:00 PM AEDT

Achieving Efficient and Effective Collaboration with your C-Suite Peers
Mallory Bulman, Sr Director Analyst, Gartner
As collaborative demands on CFOs continue to rise, finding time and bandwidth to engage with c-suite peers can be a challenge. This session explores practical strategies for systematizing interactions, enabling faster and more effective decision-making without the need for prolonged negotiations or compromise-driven outcomes. Learn how to move beyond “win a little” approaches and foster collaboration that delivers results efficiently. Attendees will leave with actionable frameworks to reduce intensity, clarify roles, and drive decisions that benefit the organization as a whole. ... Show More Show Less

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“The value and breadth of information is outstanding. I thought I had delved into a lot of research online, but the conference adds a dimension and richness that has been insightful. I’ve learned new concepts and ideas to put into practice.”

Connagh Hopkins
Head of Business Planning and Reporting, Western Power 

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