In 2026, CFOs are all in on tech transformation, according to Deloitte’s newest Signals Spotlight, published this morning. The survey polled 200 CFOs at North American companies with at least $1 billion in revenues about their top priorities for this year.

The one that got the most responses: the digital transformation of the finance department. The report found that CFOs see efficiency and productivity among their top internal risks, and both can be boosted through use of AI. While half of CEOs said using tech to transform their department was their top priority, almost as many—49%—said automating processes so employees could do higher value work was what they wanted the most from finance talent this year.

A total of 87% of CFOs said AI would be at least very important to their finance department’s operations this year, and more than half—54%—plan to integrate AI agents into their departments. Almost as many—52%—say they want to improve data quality, access and usability, and 48% plan investments to improve their tech infrastructure to support the department better.

But technology isn’t the only thing on CFOs’ minds this year, the survey found. They’re also focused on many of the things CFOs have looked at for generations, such as staying ahead of competitors in their industry, the survey found. Almost as many said they are keeping an eye on changes in customer behavior as economic pressures, higher overall prices and a difficult job market are changing the way consumers spend. Cost management is a top internal concern, with nearly half looking to hire or promote from within this year. And close to two-thirds are more interested in being a part of a deal than they were a year ago.

A new year is always a chance to restart and begin new initiatives, but other professional opportunities to make big changes also present themselves. Blake Grayson got one of these in 2023 as he joined e-signature leader Docusign as its new CFO—right before the company expanded into its new Integrated Agreement Management (IAM) platform for contracts and agreements. I spoke with Grayson about how he’s worked on the strategic pivot and helped lead Docusign into a brand-new business area. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

One of the biggest jolts to the economic picture during the Trump era came on Sunday, when Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell released a video saying the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into his testimony on renovations to the central bank’s Washington, D.C. headquarters buildings last year.

Powell said he respects the rule of law, but called this action “unprecedented,” and should be seen in the context of Trump Administration threats and the president’s consistent pressure on the Fed to lower baseline interest rates on demand.

“The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president,” he said. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether instead, monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”

President Donald Trump, who has directed the Justice Department to seek retribution against perceived political enemies, has long wanted to fire Powell from his post for not lowering interest rates quickly enough, but has lacked actual justification to do so. Powell’s term as chairman—which began following Trump’s nomination during his first term in 2017—expires in May, and Trump is expected to name Powell’s replacement in the near future. In an interview with NBC News Sunday night, Trump said he didn’t know anything about the probe, “but he’s certainly not very good at the Fed, and he’s not very good at building buildings.”

The testimony in question took place this summer, when Powell appeared before the Senate Banking Committee to discuss renovations to the headquarters buildings that had been modified from the original 2021 plans approved by the National Capitol Planning Commission. The renovations have turned out to be more expensive than initially budgeted, increasing the total to $2.5 billion, but Powell told senators they’ve scaled back some of the more luxurious aspects of the building, including VIP dining rooms, a rooftop garden, new marble and private elevators. OMB Director Russell Vought wrote Powell a letter at the time saying that any substantive changes to plans can only be made with direct approval from the National Capitol Planning Commission. Powell responded that the changes were not all that substantive, but the law establishing the Federal Reserve also gives them broad autonomy over their buildings—and they’ve been working with the planning commission the whole time.

Powell, who has until now tried to avoid confrontation with the Trump Administration, vows to stand firm and fight. And several members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, as well as former federal financial policy leaders, object to the investigation, writes Forbes senior contributor Simon Moore. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican on the Banking Committee, wrote on X that this move shows the Trump Administration is actively trying to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, and he plans to oppose confirming any Fed nominee until this issue is fully resolved.”

As the week began, gold and silver prices hit all-time highs and have continued to climb—largely because investors see precious metals as a bulwark against major tests to the stock market.

Powell is the second member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to be targeted by Trump’s Justice Department. The administration has also sought to fire Governor Lisa Cook, appointed by former President Joe Biden, over accusations of mortgage fraud. The Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether the administration can fire Cook later this month.

The economic shift that has taken place over the last several months, showing a cooling labor market and higher unemployment, continued to play out in data released last week. December’s unemployment rate was 4.4%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday, with 50,000 nonfarm jobs added during the month. The numbers showed a bit of stabilization after November’s unemployment hit 4.6%.

But it’s hard to say that December’s numbers represent good news for employment. BLS data released last Wednesday showed November’s job listings hit a four-year low of 7.15 million—below October’s 7.4 million openings, and the Dow Jones consensus of 7.61 million. And after declining consistently in December, initial unemployment claims were up a bit, hitting 208,000 the week ending January 3. But data from payroll processing firm ADP shows the private sector may be getting toward recovery. Private sector payrolls in December were up 41,000, an increase over November’s loss of 29,000 private sector jobs. Most of the increase was in mid-sized employers with 50 to 500 workers.

As employment seems to be on precarious terms, President Donald Trump appears to be finally getting the message that affordability is a major issue for consumers—something he dismissed as a “Democrat scam” last month. Consumer prices rose 2.7% last month compared to December 2024, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Tuesday, showing inflation continues to be sticky. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, he called out the drop in gas prices. He’s also talked about new policies he wants to put in place to ease affordability for consumers. Last week, he said he plans to launch a $200 billion mortgage bond purchase to try to lower mortgage rates. He also said he’ll take steps to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes to keep prices within reach for prospective homeowners, and will seek to have Congress pass laws to that effect.

Trump also called for a 10% cap on credit card interest rates for one year in a Truth Social post, but didn't say how this policy would work. Forbes senior contributor Ron Shevlin writes that the issues with the policy make it political theater: It’s something with deep implications—both for consumers and companies—that is a variation on the type of policy Democrats have embraced—meaning they should, in theory, embrace it. The president’s focus spooked investors, as bank, credit card and payment processor stocks all fell on Monday. JPMorgan Chase stock dropped about 1.5%, while Capital One was down more than 6.6% and Visa and Mastercard both ended the day down more than 1%.

As far as business indicators go, Commerce Department data released last week showed something unsurprising: In October, the U.S. trade deficit was at its lowest level since 2009. Trump’s sweeping tariff regime was intended to reduce the country’s trade deficit, and that figure shrank to $29.4 billion in October. Of course, the effective U.S. tariff rate in October was high: 17.9%, the steepest since 1934, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

While companies are paying those tariffs, many are also pressing for relief. More than 1,000 individual companies are part of litigation seeking tariff refunds—which may be the pathway to get money back if the Supreme Court rules that the so-called reciprocal tariffs Trump enacted this spring under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) are not legal. Supreme Court justices heard arguments in the case in November, and a relatively speedy ruling is expected. Many court watchers anticipated it would drop with the first batch of opinions last Friday, but it did not.

While many costs saw more rapid-than-expected increases last year, the total amount awarded in class action lawsuits outpaced them all. In 2025, more than 1,700 class action lawsuits were settled for a total of $79 billion, writes Forbes senior contributor Edward Segal—nearly double the amount from the prior year, according to the 2026 Class Action Review from the Duane Morris law firm.

“These settlement numbers reflect a new era of risk for corporate defendants and the continuation of a trend to use the class action mechanism to redistribute wealth on an unprecedented scale,” report editor and Duane Morris partner Gerald L. Maatman told Segal.

The settled litigation followed several patterns—though a single $38 billion antitrust settlement in a case brought by merchants against credit card providers, which they claimed forced them to accept higher fee cards—represented the bulk of the increase. Trends in class action lawsuits include more filed about the impact of AI, including LLM copyright violations and accusations of algorithm discrimination. More class action lawsuits are also being filed over data breaches. In 2025, the number of data breach-related lawsuits increased by more than 25%. And as the Trump Administration’s policies pulled back last year from federal enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, many employees filed class-action lawsuits instead. Discrimination enforcement is essentially moving from predictable federal government actions to “unpredictable, often high-stakes private class actions,” the report says.

Blake Grayson joined Docusign as CFO in June 2023, just as the well-known and trusted document e-signature provider was beginning its expansion to its Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform—basically an AI-powered platform for contract and agreement management that dovetails with much of Docusign’s legacy work. Having the opportunity to create a new business line to accelerate growth at a trusted company led Grayson to take the job, and IAM has seen rapid adoption.

I spoke with Grayson about how he’s crafted a strategy to expand Docusign, and how to work with customers on new opportunities. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.

What have you seen as some of the successes in the pivot to IAM and the strategy that you’ve brought to it?

Grayson: We just announced in our last earnings call that we have over 25,000 customers now on the IAM platform. For companies that talk about AI platforms, that’s a pretty sizable number. We have smaller customers than a lot of folks do, but it’s still meaningful for us. We have guided or forecasted to investors that we think by the end of our fiscal year—end of January—that IAM will represent a low double-digit share of our annualized revenue. Over time, we think that’ll continue to grow.

We have nearly 150 million agreements ingested into this repository from those customers. Our average IAM customer has around 5,000 agreements that they would put into this. I didn’t know what to expect when we started this whole process, but any time you start talking to me about somebody with thousands of agreements, their ability to track and manage those manually, I think, is very hard. And IAM makes them more productive.

Of the 150 million [agreements] that we have, in October alone, we ingested nearly 20 million. It’s growing faster and faster. And we think there’s a flywheel with that. We also find that because of all that data that we have, our ability to be more accurate and precise on the insights we provide goes up pretty materially. That’s an added advantage for our customers: They have to opt into this, but when we anonymize all their data and use it internally, it’s able to help provide more accurate results for them.

I think also because of our trusted position with customers’ agreements—they’ve been trusting us for nearly 20 years—that’s something we take very seriously. Obviously, it's a huge brand strengthener for us as well. And so I think that provides an added confidence.

Those are the components I would say that get us excited about the opportunity, but it also takes time. This is a multi-year journey for us, especially as we move out-market into selling into those really big enterprises. We’re a unique business in that we have some of the largest companies in the world as our customers. And then we have the small businesses that are the backbone of the global economy as well. They have different needs, different sales cycles, different requirements, so we’re continuing to build more and more upscale features for those folks, and that takes some time.

What have been some of the most difficult parts of working on this strategy, and also just with a company like Docusign?

The biggest transformation, we knew this going in, is moving from essentially a single-product company to a multi-product platform. It is a different relationship and a different cycle with customers.

Explaining to somebody what an e-signature is is relatively straightforward because we’ve all experienced it. I have a hard time finding an adult who hasn’t interacted with Docusign in their life. They understand it, it’s relatively clear, they understand the workflows.

When you go to a multi-product platform, we’re trying to explain: We have this repository for you to search in or we can help you with your workflows. One of the things that I think is really exciting is there’s companies that want to do customer account things. We can build a workflow for them in IAM that can prepopulate information into those customer forms based on information they already have, and then generate it straight into a signature moment, and straight into the repository. They want to make sure it’s low friction, easy for the customer, and people don’t abandon it. You can imagine a shopping analogy: Our customers want to be able to get you there.

That’s been a new thing for us. I think we’re doing a good job with it, but it’s a change in mentality to move from a single product to a platform business. For Docusign in general, as far as challenges go, any company that aspires to reaccelerate its growth is an effort and it’s a lift. We’re doing it in as balanced [of] a way as we can, like trying to balance profitability with investing for growth. While we’re still putting money into the IAM platform, we’ve been able to improve our profitability over the last few years. We want to be able to maintain that because we think it’s the right thing to do and we think we can do it, but that’s always a challenge when you’re trying to do that balance.

What kind of advice would you give to other CFOs or aspiring CFOs?

One thing that may not be super intuitive is as you go up in your career in finance, you should become even more of an analyst than you were early in your career. You need to be comfortable with the data, you need to be able to understand your business, you need to be able to ask hard questions. Along with being an analyst, I think, is the benefit of acting like an operator: How do you think about the metrics that run the business? What are the hard decisions you need to make as an operating company?

Some CFOs attack the role from more of an investment/capital allocation kind of perspective. I think that’s still important. I have to do that as part of my job, but I think more and more, the ability to add value on an operating basis with your peers and at the company is hugely valuable. I have an insatiable curiosity to understand the data. And I think that however you want to call it—diving deep, being comfortable in the details—is super important.

Now, I’m not arrogant enough to think that I’m going to know it better than people on my team, but I need to know it well enough to ask the right questions to be able to make sure I’m confident in the insights that we’re delivering.

AI chatbots can be incredibly useful, providing advice, research help and recommendations. But an AI chatbot has no actual life experience, and what it knows is just an average of information from the internet. When you need strong opinions on crucial decisions and recommendations with deep reasoning, you won’t benefit from an average of what others—who may not even be anything like you and your company—have done.

In times of turmoil, resilience can help you and your business remain stable, but resilience also shows that you’ve adjusted to whatever is happening. Instead of just adjusting, ask yourself whether those conditions are really worth adjusting to or if it’s time to evolve.

Which venture capital fund raised $15 billion in 2025: about a fifth of the total VC money raised last year?

A. A16z

B. Sequoia Capital

C. Bessemer Venture Partners

D. Tiger Global Management

See if you got the right answer here.

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