By Kristin Broughton and Jennifer Williams

Finance chiefs once questioned the returns on investing in artificial intelligence. Those days are gone.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's CFO Council Summit in Palo Alto, Calif., finance chiefs from the tech, retail and financial services sectors said their companies are seeing big gains in efficiency and productivity -- in some cases worth millions of dollars -- from their investments in generative AI. Nudging employees to embrace AI also has yielded new ideas about how to accomplish time-consuming tasks, CFOs said.

Finance chiefs say they are playing a leading role in their company's AI transformation efforts, evaluating performance, pushing for productivity gains and clearly articulating the value to reluctant employees.

"It's about ensuring they understand that AI is not going to take your job. People who use AI are going to take your job if you don't become a power user and understand the value," Gina Mastantuono, ServiceNow's president and CFO, said about employee messaging on the topic.

At ServiceNow, AI investments have produced savings worth $355 million, according to Mastantuono. The software company reinvested about two-thirds of those savings, and let about $125 million fall to its bottom line, she said. ServiceNow in 2025 earned $1.75 billion, up 23% from a year earlier.

Shopify said last year in an employee memo that it wouldn't hire new employees unless managers prove that AI couldn't do the job, and that AI would be part of employees' performance reviews. "In order to be, among other things, really successful here, you have to use AI," CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said, discussing the memo at the event.

Over the last three years, Shopify has held its head count relatively flat, Hoffmeister said. Annual revenue growth over that period has hovered around 30%. The company saw a nearly immediate boost to product innovation after it sent the memo, he said.

Finance chiefs said they have urged colleagues to welcome lessons from recent college graduates about how to use AI while encouraging midlevel employees reluctant to use new AI tools to embrace change.

At Levi Strauss, a lower-ranking employee created an AI agent to help the company input wholesale orders. Using the agent, Levi's can finish inputting certain orders within minutes, whereas it used to take days, Chief Financial and Growth Officer Harmit Singh said. The agent also has a much higher accuracy rate, he said.

Employees who previously inputted orders are now focused on collecting receivables, Singh said. "They are upskilling," he said.

Finance chiefs said they also are gauging consumer resilience at an uncertain moment in the economy.

Americans continue to spend, particularly higher-income shoppers, executives said. Lower-income households, meanwhile, are trading down and spending more selectively. How rising oil prices stemming from the war in the Middle East will influence those habits remains to be seen.

"I don't think we have enough data yet," said Shopify's Hoffmeister. "But historically, when you've seen some increase in oil prices, and especially on gasoline...consumers need to find where that comes from in terms of their pocketbook."

If oil prices remain high, consumers in the medium term will likely accelerate spending, said Silvio Tavares, chief executive at credit score company VantageScore. The same dynamic appeared soon after tariffs were announced, with consumers making immediate purchases in an attempt to beat any price increases, he said. Tavares expects a similar reaction to the shock to the oil market.

Longer term is a different story, according to Tavares. The extent of the disruption to the petroleum infrastructure in the Middle East will fundamentally change oil supply, which will mean higher costs over time, he said.

"It's unclear whether that inflationary effect is going to slow the economy significantly, but I think in the long term it probably will," Tavares said.

Write to Kristin Broughton at Kristin.Broughton@wsj.com and Jennifer Williams at jennifer.williams@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 24, 2026 20:23 ET (00:23 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.