Digital transformation has reached a decisive inflection point for finance leaders—and Ireland is no exception. EY Ireland’s CFO Survey 2026, which polled 200 CFOs and senior finance leaders between December 2025 and January 2026, reveals AI adoption within the finance function has nearly quadrupled year on year, from 12% to 47%. The findings arrive as global AI spending is forecast to reach $2.52 trillion (approximately €2.32 trillion) in 2026, a 44% increase year on year, according to Gartner. For Irish executives, pressure to move from pilot programmes to scalable, value-generating deployment has never been more acute.

The acceleration is encouraging, yet the EY survey exposes structural weaknesses that could blunt the returns on Ireland’s digital ambitions. Rapid adoption without commensurate investment in cybersecurity resilience and digital talent is a formula for fragile transformation rather than durable competitive advantage. Three fault lines demand attention: an underprepared cybersecurity posture, an unresolved digital talent deficit, and the persistent difficulty of demonstrating tangible return on AI investment.

On cybersecurity, the data are striking. The share of Irish CFOs identifying strengthening cyber controls as a top priority has nearly tripled, from 8% to 23%, according to EY. Yet only 12% of organisations surveyed have tested third-party outage scenarios confidently enough to ensure operations could continue uninterrupted. A KPMG study found cybersecurity ranked as the single greatest barrier to AI strategy goals globally, with half of finance leaders planning to spend between $10 million and $50 million (approximately €9.2 million to €46 million) securing agentic architectures and hardening model governance.

The talent deficit is equally pressing. The EY survey records progress—the proportion of finance leaders investing in upskilling has grown from 47% to 60%—but the gap between ambition and capability remains wide. Gartner estimates fewer than 20% of finance employees currently possess digital skills, despite CFOs expecting half their workforce to qualify as digital talent by 2027. PwC Ireland’s 2026 AI Business Predictions report notes only 9% of Irish organisations report widespread AI agent use, against 52% in the United States.

To convert ambition into lasting advantage, Irish CFOs should pursue three actions. They should commission independent cyber resilience assessments designed around AI-enabled finance systems, simulating breach and supplier outage scenarios before regulators expose vulnerabilities. They must establish formal return-on-investment frameworks linking technology spending to measurable outcomes in cycle-time reduction, forecast accuracy, and fraud prevention. Finance functions should also develop structured digital talent programmes in partnership with Enterprise Ireland and IDA-supported firms, building the hybrid capabilities that AI-literate teams require.

EY’s survey documents an inflection that is real and gathering pace. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report finds organisations treating AI as a catalyst for wholesale transformation, rather than incremental efficiency gains, consistently outperform peers. Ireland possesses the regulatory infrastructure—anchored by the Digital Ireland strategy and a National AI Office due by August 2026—and increasingly confident finance leadership to compete at the frontier. The question is not whether AI will reshape Irish finance; it already is. The test is whether leaders move purposefully enough to make those gains permanent.

(The views expressed by the writer are his/her own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of BusinessRiver.)