It’s getting harder to find a corner of the market that’s untouched by AI. The technology is becoming part of more business models, with companies signing deals with AI firms or hyperscalers directly. Those transactions can generate substantial revenue and profits for shareholders. But they also raise a question for CFOs: At what point does benefiting from AI leave a company (too) exposed to it?

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.

“The biggest change of 2026 when it comes to AI has been that the cost of using it has gone up dramatically. It went from being largely invisible on the [profit and loss statement] to being somewhere between substantial and scary, depending on which type of business you are. We were totally focused on driving adoption and didn’t think about cost at all. We were assuming that costs would go down at about the same speed of the adoption – along the lines of ‘we’re using ten times more tokens, but the price per token will go down by 10 x and therefore it doesn’t matter.’ Turns out we were using a hundred times more tokens and the price hasn’t gone down by 10 x necessarily.”

This and more from McKinsey CFO Yuval Atsmon in the latest edition of Bloomberg’s CFO Briefing.

Among the many metrics that companies disclose each earnings season, there’s one in particular that has become key: free cash flow. Investors increasingly scrutinize the amounts of money that companies generate for shareholder returns, debt servicing or dealmaking as they pour billions of dollars into projects such as data centers and computing infrastructure. More in the latest edition of Bloomberg’s CFO Briefing.

The idea of the strategic CFO comes up in almost every conversation I have with finance executives these days. The role has expanded well beyond accounting and reporting. Many CFOs now oversee functions such as procurement, supply chain and technology, and they’re increasingly seen as the No. 2 or No. 3 candidate to become CEO. But, the increase in relative importance in the corporate hierarchy doesn’t translate into bigger compensation packages in relation to the CEO. The latest edition of Bloomberg’s CFO Briefing looks at what’s driving that disconnect.