Why Finance Is the Performance Engine for Professional Services Firms, Not Just the Scorekeeper

Here's a closer look at what's driving this shift, and what it means for the finance leaders navigating it.

Seventy-eight percent of professional services firms in the UK, Germany, and Australia expect profits to increase in 2026, with 22% forecasting growth of 10% or more. At the same time, 55% cite global political instability as a major concern for the year ahead, with inflation (54%) and cybersecurity risk (52%) close behind. That gap between confidence and uncertainty is landing squarely on the desks of CFOs, finance directors, and financial controllers. In practice, the finance office is where growth targets and risk exposure must be reconciled month by month.

These are among the headline findings in The CFO's Agenda: AI, Cyber Risk, and Profitability. Drawing on data from the 7th Annual Deltek Clarity Study, the guide unpacks the drivers of profitability, risk, and technology investment for finance leaders at architecture, engineering, and consulting firms. It covers the shifting margin equation, AI's return on investment, cybersecurity exposure, and the data gaps quietly costing firms margin.

None of the pressures mentioned are new. What's changed is the expectation now placed on finance to respond to them in real time, with a level of confidence the board can act on.

The message is consistent throughout: finance is no longer the function that reports on how the year went. It's the function expected to shape how the year goes.

Why the Remit of the Finance Office Has Expanded

This isn't unique to project-based professional services firms. Deloitte's Q4 2025 CFO Signals report found that the digital transformation of finance is now the single biggest priority for CFOs, overtaking enterprise risk management, which held the top spot a year earlier. The same report found that 87% of CFOs believe AI will be extremely or very important to their finance operations this year.

Within architecture, engineering, and consulting firms specifically, that expanded remit plays out in three areas where finance now has a growing stake:

• AI and automation governance. Finance has a growing say in where AI agents enter financial workflows, and how their outputs are trusted and acted on. According to the CFO Agenda guide, 91% of firms already consider AI critical to their organization's success, and 68% are increasing investment in 2026, but only 46% are seeing measurable productivity gains or cost savings so far. Closing that gap is no longer something that finance can leave entirely to IT.
• Integrated performance visibility. Finance leaders are increasingly involved in shaping the data infrastructure that connects project delivery to financial outcomes in real time, not after the month-end close. Many firms aren't there yet, 53% describe themselves as "mostly integrated, with some tools still disconnected," leaving finance to bridge the gap with manual workarounds in the meantime.
• Forward-looking cost control. Finance's role is moving from approval and reporting toward predictive spend management as workforce and delivery complexity grow. With 63% of firms planning to grow headcount in 2026, cost control is shifting from a monthly review exercise into a continuous, project-level discipline.

Each of these areas carries its own risks and upside, and the CFO Agenda guide devotes a dedicated section to what separates the firms pulling ahead from those still catching up in each one.

50% of CFOs now rank the digital transformation of finance as their #1 priority, overtaking last year's priority of enterprise risk management.

- Deloitte, Q4 2025 CFO Signals

The Tension Finance Leaders Must Navigate

The guide also reveals a defining tension: firms must protect margins now while simultaneously investing for future advantage. These two imperatives can feel like they're pulling in opposite directions, but the data suggest otherwise.

Firms with integrated systems, active AI adoption, and greater digital maturity report higher gross profit margins, stronger KPI discipline, and greater confidence in their financial reporting than their less mature peers. Protecting margin and investing in capability aren't competing priorities; for high-performing firms and finance functions, they're the same priority.

What Other Pressures Are Testing Finance Leaders?

The expanding finance remit is only one piece of the picture. The CFO's Agenda covers three further pressures reshaping the role of the finance function:

• The margin equation has changed. Cost control has overtaken revenue growth as the top profitability lever, cited by 34% of firms, up from 26% two years ago.
• Cybersecurity is now a P&L issue, not just an IT one. Two-thirds of firms have been targeted by a cyber attack in the past three years, and 45% of those that experienced a successful attack reported direct financial losses, rising to 50% among UK firms.
• Good data doesn't always mean timely decisions. 86% of firms say they track operating profit adequately or well, yet less than a quarter of firms have a fully integrated project management system feeding that view, meaning most finance leaders are acting on data that's already out of date.

Each of these gets its own full section in the guide, alongside a breakdown of what high-performing firms are doing differently to turn them into an advantage.

The Function That Shapes Performance, Not Just Reports on It

The firms pulling ahead aren't necessarily the ones with the deepest resources. They're the ones where finance is already closely involved in AI governance, has helped build the data infrastructure to monitor performance in real time, and has shifted cost control from a monthly exercise to a forward-looking discipline. For finance leaders in architecture, engineering, and consulting, that's the new baseline.

Get the full picture in The CFO's Agenda: AI, Cyber Risk, and Profitability, including the data behind the margin equation shift, AI ROI, cybersecurity exposure, and the integration gap costing firms margin.