CFOs Plan Biggest Tech Spend in 5 Years: What It Means for HR

CFOs are planning their largest technology spend in five years. That’s the upshot of Grant Thornton’s Q4 2025 CFO survey, which gathered insight from more than 230 senior finance leaders.

What that means for HR becomes clear once you look at where responsibility for those investments lands.

How Tech Spending Reaches HR

A whopping 67% of respondents said they expect to increase their spending on technology and IT in the next year. That’s a 20-quarter high in the survey.

Why the shift now? CFOs are responding to competitive pressure to modernize systems while capital is still available.

“A lot of CFOs believe keeping up with the pace of change on the AI front is essential for them to take advantage of the positive outlook that they see in the economy,” said David Sites, National Managing Partner for Grant Thornton’s Washington National Tax Office and International Tax Solutions. “But that’s where the uncertainty comes from. CFOs are not always sure which levers they need to pull to get digital transformation right.”

The survey found just 58% of finance leaders expressed confidence in meeting their technology objectives — down from 66% in Q3 last year. That execution gap is where HR becomes a risk factor or a stabilizer, depending on whether the workforce is prepared to absorb the change.

Finance is also prioritizing resiliency. Sixty percent said they expect cybersecurity expenses to rise — up 17 percentage points from last quarter.

That shift matters for HR because employment attorneys expect increased litigation tied to employee data breaches and AI hiring tools that expose PII or risk discrimination claims. Single incidents now trigger class actions and state AG scrutiny, which elevates these risks quickly into CFO-level concerns.

Compliance platforms and secure HRIS upgrades now fall under cybersecurity spend, where data and cybersecurity litigation trends already justify investment.

Where HR Gets Pulled Into Tech Decisions

Now that CFOs say they’re open to allocating more resources to tech upgrades, how can HR capitalize on the opportunity?

1. Think Like a Finance Pro

First, it helps to know what the C-suite has in mind.

“By now, everybody understands the hand they’ve been dealt,” said Michael Desmond, Audit Growth Leader for Grant Thornton in Charlotte. “They’re surrounded by instability and uncertainty, but they’re putting mechanisms in place to deal with that.”

Desmond said tech spending provides an opportunity to make an impact in three key areas:

1. Customer interfaces and customer experience
2. Production and operational processes
3. Back-office administration

“The first should have top-line lift,” Desmond said. “The second should have margin benefit. The third should have a bottom-line benefit. So each one affects a different aspect of the P&L.”

Desmond just showed CFOs how tech hits every line of the P&L. What they don’t always see coming: each one changes jobs, schedules, and skills — and lands straight in HR’s inbox.

• Customer interfaces (top-line growth): Chatbots and CRM upgrades change scripts, workflows, and scheduling patterns. HR ends up retraining frontline teams, updating performance plans, and managing customer-facing fallout when systems fail.
• Production processes (margin improvement): Automation and inventory systems shift frontline roles from manual execution to system oversight. That change creates immediate skills gaps, scheduling pressure, and labor relations questions. HR ends up redesigning training paths and managing workforce transitions tied directly to margin targets.
• Back-office administration (bottom-line savings): Payroll AI and HRIS upgrades cut admin headcount. HR rewrites timekeeping policies, audits automated decisions for compliance, and plans redeployment when clerks aren’t needed anymore.

CFOs fund the tech. HR makes it work without turnover spikes, EEOC claims, or managers reinventing policy on the fly.

What that means for HR: That dynamic puts pressure on HR to support training and reskilling on the same timeline that finance expects performance gains.

Even if CFOs target different goals, HR watches the same metrics: attrition, time-to-fill, and engagement. All expensive problems.

Here’s the connection CFOs care about: training gaps drive attrition, slow hiring raises labor costs, and disengagement shows up in productivity before it ever hits a dashboard. If positioned correctly, HR technology addresses those risks.

Bottom line: Find the C-suite’s top priority, and match your tech ask to that metric.

2. Getting the ‘Yes’ – Make a Business Case

Getting to yes depends on framing your request the same way finance evaluates any other investment: expected upside, downside risk, and the cost of doing nothing.

That’s the lens many CFOs use today. In an external webinar, Getting a Yes from your CFO, 1Mind CFO Scott Broomfield explains that finance leaders are less interested in optimistic projections than in whether the downside is contained if assumptions fall short.

That distinction matters for HR. If delaying action creates compliance risk or disrupts adoption of systems finance already paid for, approval becomes a risk decision, not a preference. This is where framing the business case matters.