Budgeting used to be a fairly predictable, albeit intense and laborious exercise at many companies. Each September or October, finance leaders would kick off the process, which stretched over several months and involved number crunching, scenario planning, forecasting and – perhaps most importantly – compromising over which spending to prioritize. But with artificial intelligence upending their processes, many chief financial officers are realizing their old ways of budgeting no longer work.

Going into the year, bond traders were pricing in several rate cuts. Companies reacted by increasing their allocations to fixed-income instruments, while cutting their cash holdings, according to Clearwater Analytics, which tracks $1.6 trillion in holdings from roughly 800 companies, most of them US-based.

After peaking in June, duration started to decline as it became clear to treasurers that the war in Iran wouldn’t be ending soon, and that its inflationary effects would build over time.

Traders’ current outlook, which includes three further rate increases by the middle of next year, is making the case for treasurers to allocate more money to cash and cash-like instruments such as money market funds, and less to fixed-income securities.

Finding the right time to sell debt may soon become more difficult for CFOs. High energy prices are driving up inflation and interest rate expectations ahead of the US midterm elections in November, essentially shortening the window for executives to this month and October. Ahead of the Fed’s rate decision on Wednesday, I spoke to finance chiefs and advisors about where the credit markets are headed.

CFOs, one might think, have plenty of use for their companies’ cash right now, including investments in new business opportunities, artificial intelligence and other technology, as well as debt reduction.

Still, they’re spending big on buybacks — in part to offset dilution. US companies allocated $307.3 billion toward share repurchases in the second quarter, up from $255.7 billion a year earlier and just shy of the previous quarterly record of $312 billion in the first quarter of 2022, according to Birinyi Associates, an investment-management firm.

It’s a balance that executives have to strike: how much to allocate toward capacity expansion or M&A, which may pay off in the medium term, versus buybacks, which tend to have more immediate benefits. That’s even more complicated at a time when many companies are figuring out how AI might change their business model, and whether they will need extra cash to pivot in the coming year or two.

For the latest edition of Bloomberg’s CFO Briefing, I spoke to finance chiefs at Autodesk, Match Group, Workiva, Protolabs and nVent about how they’re weighing those different uses of corporate cash.

As a generation of executives heads for retirement, boards are taking markedly different approaches to filling the top two jobs. Plus, Autodesk’s Janesh Moorjani on AI monetization.

The US Supreme Court’s tariff decision earlier this year left many companies in line for an unexpected influx of cash, and their CFOs with a somewhat unusual question: What to do with the money? More in the latest edition of Bloomberg’s CFO Briefing.