Demand for fractional or interim financial leadership has continued to rise in recent years, boosted earlier by the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently by artificial intelligence. The integration of AI into finance and accounting has already “changed our business dramatically in the last three months,” Jason Hope, fractional CFO and founder of Hope Financial Consulting said. Digital and AI initiatives also emerged as “a significant cross-functional area of demand” impacting 2026 talent trends, according to the report. Hope Financial Consulting served mid-market companies in industries including e-commerce, commercial real estate and manufacturing. For Hope, AI isn’t replacing CFO-level tasks: “'it’s a new responsibility for the CFO to help the company adopt and to learn it themselves,” he said.