How hard will post MBA strategic finance roles be impacted by AI?

[u/Lazy-Let-1991]

I have a return offer for a strategic finance role in big tech. I’m starting to get a little spooked about the medium term prospects of the role.

The role itself has some easily automated aspects, like financial reporting assistance, that are adjacent to FP&A. But there are some other aspects that seem higher value - a big part of the job is all about relationships and being the speaker for finance in conversations with product & engineering.

My internship heavily involved AI but I did feel that there was a distinctly human part that was valuable, and I was able to serve as an orchestrator and a relationship builder - I was the one who had all the conversations and hunted down all of the internal documentation that I could then feed into AI, paired with my own analysis & judgement, to build my end product, whether that be a model or a decision.

They have actually lowered compensation against last year, which makes me fear that companies are seeing this as among one of the first roles to go if AI accelerates.

Thoughts on this? Is there another part of finance I should prioritize for full time recruitment? If you aren’t in IB/PE are you just living on borrowed time?

[u/ResolutionMundane166]

AI can’t provide judgment, accountability, or build relationships. You aren’t getting rid of work, instead you are accelerating the depth and velocity of work when you build automations with AI to spend on higher value tasks. What the world looks like in 5 years may be different, but as for now you provide a clear value to the value chain. If you work closely with AI in the day to day you’re bound to see the thousands of little errors it makes and it’s inability to build frameworks or relay information to others in a digestible way

[u/Exciting-Republic762]

its not a binary thing where the role either exists or gets wiped out, more like the texture of the work shifts

the parts of the job that are pure data aggregation and variance commentary will get compressed into smaller time blocks, which actually makes the relationship piece more important not less. you become the person who translates whatever the model spits out into language a product lead can act on, and that translation layer is sticky

comp coming down could just be a market cooling thing, tech over-hired and now theyre squeezing, happens every few years

if you want a hedge, corporate development is less exposed to the kind of automation youre worried about, still heavy on judgment and negotiation and deal sense, harder to template