Tackling your board's next big question

“Tech CFO” for the last 15 years has been a proxy for “Software CFO”. But the technology sector of 2026 is as much about physical items like chips, robots, and data centers, as it is about bits of code and people. Managing CapEx, inventory, and real variable cost are growing requirements for Tech CFO roles. Those finance leaders will need skillsets drawn from both software and industrial CFOs.

SCFO said it best: "I'll say this until I'm blue in the face — the biggest wins from AI in finance will come from aggressively implementing AI-native core infrastructure."

Most finance teams are still bolting AI onto tools built for a different era. The result? Marginal gains at best.

Campfire was built differently. AI-native from the ground up, so your team spends less time on the work AI should own and more time on the decisions only you can make.

Curious what that looks like for your team? Book a demo.

👉 See Campfire in action

Oracle is going big on AI. Really, ‘small country GDP’ big. The company is targeting $50 billion in CapEx for 2026, mostly for AI infrastructure, which former CFO Doug Kehring said “was for revenue-generating equipment.”  But the scale of spending on AI is making investors nervous. The company’s stock is down 24% YoY, despite putting up their best quarter in 15 years, with revenue up more than 20%. 

So, when Oracle recently went looking for a new CFO, they needed one who'd managed real physical infrastructure and manufacturing at scale. And more importantly, one who investors would believe could do it.

Who they got was Hilary Maxson. Before her early April appointment as Oracle CFO, she was CFO at energy giant Schneider Electric. A CapEx-heavy, global business. Before that, she spent 12 years at utility company AES Corporation across finance, strategy, and M&A. 

In other words, Oracle, as a tech company, skipped over tech CFOs. Instead, they hired someone who knows how to build physical infrastructure, manage capital across long time horizons, and work with a dynamic supply chain.

“A pure-SaaS CFO optimizes a high-margin, low-CapEx engine where the main lever is headcount and go-to-market spend,” said Minh Pham, senior finance manager at Microsoft. “An infrastructure CFO has to think more like a utility operator, committing big bets on capital a year or two ahead of demand, then sweating every machine to make sure it's used.”

So, is the new Oracle CFO the exception or a template for the tech CFO of the future? 

Jim McGlone, leader of the UK financial officers practice at Russell Reynolds, said the rise in AI CapEx is increasing the baseline skills that tech CFOs need. 

"As tech companies accelerate investment into AI infrastructure, demand is growing for hybrid finance leaders who combine technology expertise with experience in manufacturing, infrastructure, or industrial operations,” he said.

Few CFOs have all these on their resume, so they need to rapidly learn new operating models while transferring lessons from adjacent sectors, McGlone added.

Ash Athawale, SVP of the executive search practice at Robert Half, said demand for this skills blend will continue as infrastructure investment accelerates. 

“The strongest finance leaders are partnering more with supply chain, engineering, and frontline teams to better understand daily operations,” he said.

Dmitry Shevelenko is chief business officer at Perplexity and ultimately acts as CFO. He said the trend toward importing manufacturing skills is “probably real,” but most hyperscaler CFOs are still from finance and tech backgrounds.

“Every discipline has a different kind of hard. [Tech CFOs] have to move faster, with tighter volatility cycles. And remember, many tech investors still want to speak and think in terms of SaaS. What’s changed is everyone’s now working across disciplines,” he said.

The proof is in the spending. Take the vast compute power needed to support advanced AI products. It’s forcing tech firms to buy or secure chips, data centers, power, and other infrastructure to control their supply chains.

Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta alone plan $635 billion in infrastructure spend in 2026, up from $383 billion last year. Even mid-sized software firms and institutions, like universities and research centers, are considering buying infrastructure to secure long-term supply.

But these things take time, and a lot of CapEx, to build. Tech finance leaders can’t simply throw venture capital money at developers and cloud bills to speed up supply and hope the problem disappears. 

Predicting memory supply, demand, and pricing is difficult; managing physical infrastructure requires a battle-hardened, manufacturing ops mindset. Skillsets many Saas CFOs don’t have yet.

That challenge is showing up in real ways for CFOs. In a recent podcast appearance, Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao recognized compute has become a scarce resource that needs a careful capital allocation framework. It’s a huge forecasting challenge to secure the right amount on the right day when your company is growing exponentially, he said on the podcast.

Anthropic often forecasts how much compute it needs daily and Rao spends 30% to 40% of his time on compute issues. Rao talks about compute like fast moving perishable inventory, more like a produce supply chain, than any conventional tech asset. Anthropic has also invested heavily to increase flexibility and productivity of this hardware, for example using multiple chip providers and investing in a research team to drive efficiency.

That means traditional tech CFOs are going to need to learn to operate in businesses with different shape unit economics that fits a world of atoms, not just bits. Many are already seeing it as they absorb the challenge of controlling an explosion in AI token spend inside their business.

“The tech finance function has definitely changed. For over 50 years in software, the marginal cost of serving an additional user has been zero,” said Shevelenko. “AI just isn’t that way. Finance teams in AI that don’t account for this are accelerating their own company’s failure.”

Some CFOs are already there. Marc Suidan is CFO Backblaze, an AI and cloud company that offers storage infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to neocloud, AI developers and broader enterprises. His role straddles tech and manufacturing skills. 

In the latter, “gross margin and cost of goods sold are suddenly way more important to investors and to value creation. Operations rely on a supply chain that doesn’t exist in SaaS.”

But he counts on a different skillset in the tech side of his role.  

“Tech CFOs need to be able to scale operations based on funds raised, and very quickly flex costs up and down quickly according to demand,” he said.

Carl Rushbridge is CFO at data center cooling system engineering firm Data Airflow and has previously worked at software development firms. He said: “The cash burn and uncertainty in large infrastructure products can be scary if you’re not used to it. For example, you might think you’ve locked in supply, but the manufacturer might get a higher offer, so you need solid contracts.”

Inexperienced CFOs can get paralyzed with timing too. “Do we buy compute now or later? Do we lease it? Sometimes you just have to decide and stick with it. If you’ve been successful in a Saas company, you’re used to low overheads and light balance sheets. Recognizing you don’t have the right expertise or understanding in this world is a climbdown for some egos,” said Rushbridge.

Ultimately, it’s probably too early to tell if Maxson is the model for tech CFOs moving forward. But it ain’t your younger brother’s tech CFO seat anymore either.

To keep up, finance leaders are going to have to get much closer to the guts of where the magic comes from in the business. And that will help if the tech industry can start importing talent from industrial businesses at different levels. They might just find a head of FP&A from a low margin industrial business helps them think about token spend control in a new way.

Remember, few individuals have all these skills combined yet. It’s a new way of working.

“Effective finance leaders will bridge engineering, supply chain, operations, and capital markets simultaneously, not just selling the revenue growth story,” said Pham. “For hiring, the value is shifting toward people who are just as comfortable reading a factory utilization report as a sales chart. Companies are seeking professionals who can evaluate a software feature launch and a billion-dollar infrastructure investment with equal confidence.”

And a more open mindset is essential. “AI is changing almost everything,” said Shevelenko. “We definitely need a new kind of CFO. Tenured executives can lean on their experience while questioning it. Without flexible thinking and fast action, you don’t belong in tech.”

But AI isn’t forcing only tech CFOs to become faster, more versatile. It’s all CFOs.

Answering your board’s next big question.

Last week’s Playbook got into how to fund working capital (while avoiding the killer ‘crack debt’).

If you found this helpful, please forward it to your fellow finance leaders (and maybe even your Board). If this was forwarded to you, make sure you receive the next edition by subscribing here.