Winning the War for Talent: Why AI and Automation Are Becoming a Competitive Advantage in Finance Recruitment

For years, businesses have competed for finance talent largely through salary, bonus structures and career progression, and while all of those things still matter a great deal, something more interesting is now happening in the market. Increasingly, the strongest finance professionals come to an interview with a different set of questions, wanting to know what systems you run, how efficient your processes really are, how much of the role is still manual, what you are actually doing with AI and automation, and whether they will spend their time adding value or producing reports. The point is that firms are no longer competing on compensation alone; they are competing on the quality of the work they can offer, and the organisations that have genuinely embraced AI and automation are opening up a meaningful advantage.

The best talent wants different work

For decades the finance profession has carried a heavy load of repetitive activity, from reconciling data and building spreadsheets to producing reports and reworking information from one format into another, and most people have simply accepted it as part of the job. The latest generation of finance professionals has arrived with different expectations, wanting to spend far more of their time analysing data, influencing decisions, partnering with stakeholders, solving business problems and supporting growth, and far less of it on repetitive administrative work.

None of that is merely anecdotal. Microsoft and LinkedIn's 2024 Work Trend Index, drawn from a survey of 31,000 people across 31 countries, found that 75% of knowledge workers were already using AI at work, and that among those users 90% said it helped them save time, 85% that it helped them focus on their most important work, 84% that it made them more creative and 83% that it made them enjoy their work more. Employees, in other words, are not asking for AI only because it makes the business more efficient; they are asking for it because it makes the work itself better.

Candidates are assessing employers too

Historically the assessment ran one way, with employers judging candidates, whereas today candidates judge employers just as closely. When a finance professional has several offers on the table, they increasingly look well beyond the job description to weigh up the quality of the technology stack, the maturity of the finance processes, whether leadership genuinely embraces innovation, how much exposure they will get to automation and AI, and whether the role as a whole feels future-proof.

The most sought-after professionals understand where the profession is heading and know that AI and automation are becoming a permanent part of modern finance, so many of them want to join organisations that are helping to shape that future rather than resisting it. Where one employer offers a heavily manual role and another offers real exposure to automation, process improvement and AI-enabled decision-making, the choice is often becoming a much easier one to make.

AI is changing the employer value proposition

Most discussion of AI focuses on productivity, which is understandable given how quickly adoption is spreading through finance, and Protiviti's 2026 Global Finance Trends survey of more than 900 finance executives found that 77% of finance organisations are now using AI while only 14% of them have a defined strategy for it. Productivity is still only part of the story, though, because forward-thinking organisations are also beginning to recognise that AI and automation strengthen their employer brand by creating an environment in which people can spend more of their time on work that matters. That is significant, since people rarely stay in roles where they feel their expertise is being wasted, and a qualified finance professional does not aspire to spend a career manipulating spreadsheets and manually consolidating reports; they want their skills to make a visible difference, and AI and automation help to create exactly that opportunity. The result tends to show up as better employee engagement, stronger retention, improved attraction of high-performing candidates, greater internal mobility and, taken together, more fulfilling finance careers.

The skills employers need are changing

A second shift is happening at the same time, because as organisations adopt AI and automation the skills they need within their finance teams are themselves changing. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that AI and big data is the single fastest-growing skill for employers over the coming years, with technology literacy close behind, while analytical thinking remains the most sought-after core skill of all, and the same report estimates that 39% of workers' existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. Microsoft and LinkedIn's research points in the same direction, finding that 66% of leaders would not hire someone without AI skills and that 71% would rather take on a less experienced candidate who has them than a more experienced one who does not.

That creates an awkward bind, because the very candidates an organisation most wants to attract are often the same people who most want exposure to technology-enabled ways of working, which means a finance function that is not evolving may find it harder to recruit the people it needs in order to evolve it.

The retention opportunity is often overlooked

Most conversations about talent concentrate on recruitment when retention deserves at least equal attention. A great many finance professionals leave roles not because of the organisation or the people but because the work itself has stopped developing, and when repetitive tasks come to dominate a role, engagement falls away almost inevitably. Where organisations instead use technology to strip out low-value activity, they open up far more room for learning, development and genuine commercial involvement. Research from Deloitte reinforces the point, because its 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that roughly three-quarters of both groups were using AI in their day-to-day work, and that those with the most hands-on experience were the most likely to believe it improves the way they work, frees up their time and supports a better work-life balance. That should weigh heavily with every finance leader who is thinking seriously about how to keep good people.

The future talent advantage

The organisations that win the competition for talent over the next five years are unlikely to be those offering only the highest salaries; they will be the ones offering the most compelling future, in which technology handles more of the routine work, finance professionals spend more of their time adding value, teams are embedded in commercial decision-making, continuous improvement is expected rather than exceptional, and AI is adopted responsibly and practically. The future finance professional wants to influence the business rather than simply report on it, and the future finance team wants insight to be its main output rather than administration, so the organisations that are building deliberately towards that vision today will be in a far stronger position to attract and keep the best people tomorrow.

Final thought

The conversation about AI and automation is usually framed around efficiency and cost, and yet one of its largest benefits may turn out to be talent, because the best people increasingly want to work for businesses that help them do their best work. In modern finance that means building an environment where technology takes on the grunt work and frees capable professionals to concentrate on what they were actually hired to do, which is to think, to influence and to add value.

At FIN, we help finance leaders build future-ready finance functions that combine great people, smart processes and the right technology. Reach out to us to have a conversation about how iMultiply and FIN can help.