Three finance roles that do not exist yet

The finance function today looks different from five years ago, and that was before generative AI changed what automation could do. Reconciliations that took days now take hours. Variance analysis gets a first pass from a model. The routine processing layer of finance is contracting.

What is less discussed is what fills the space. Automation removes work. It also creates requirements that nobody has fully defined, because they are emerging from the intersection of finance expertise and technology capability in ways that existing job titles do not capture.

Three roles are described below. Not distant possibilities. Things that will be needed within five years and that finance functions should be building capability for now.

Finance prompt engineer

Imran Hussain, a consultant focused on SME finance, describes this role as bridging the gap between IT and finance. The problem it solves is real: IT teams are not accounting experts, and accountants are not typically software engineers. Finance increasingly needs people who are enough of both to build the tools that neither group builds alone.

This is not speculative. It describes work that is already happening informally, done by finance professionals who have learned enough Python or SQL to build the tools their teams need, without formal recognition that they are doing anything other than their day job.

I have built this kind of capability in finance functions: writing API integrations, connecting systems that were never designed to talk to each other, building the automation logic that replaced manual processes. Not because I had an engineering background. Because the tools required it and nobody else was going to do it.

As AI coding tools reduce the barrier further, Hussain predicts that more accountants will build workflows and applications with relatively little formal coding knowledge. The finance prompt engineer does this deliberately and well: understanding accounting well enough to specify what tools need to do, and understanding the technology well enough to build and validate the outputs.

Critically, the role involves managing hallucination risk: understanding where AI outputs are most likely to be unreliable and building validation logic that catches those failures before they propagate. Coding skills matter. Professional scepticism matters more.

Finance storyteller

The numbers are rarely the problem.

The problem is the gap between what the numbers show and what the business actually does with that information. Analysis that does not change a decision has produced a report, not value. The finance storyteller is the person who closes that gap.

David Taylor of Eton Bridge Partners frames it directly: “Businesses now want insight-shaped narratives. The best finance teams get under the skin of what drives performance, from pricing through to customer profitability.”

Hussain describes the shift as moving from “what” to “so what.” The analytical work, understanding what happened and why, will increasingly be handled by AI. The human contribution is the interpretation: why it matters for decisions the business needs to make now, and how to communicate that in a way that changes behaviour rather than fills an inbox.

This requires skills not currently central to finance training: understanding how different audiences process and act on information, the ability to adapt framing for a board presentation versus a commercial conversation, the psychology of persuasion in contexts where the recommendation involves difficult trade-offs.

The board pack argument makes this concrete. Board packs that get read rather than filed are the ones where the narrative is doing the analytical work. The finance storyteller is what produces them. Boards and CEOs who want finance as a commercial partner rather than a reporting function need finance professionals who can communicate in those terms.

ESG finance director

This is the role with the most certain trajectory, because the regulatory pressure is already locked in.

Global standards including the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) and Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) are establishing sustainability reporting requirements with the same formal standing as financial reporting. The CSRD has extended Scope 3 requirements to supply chains: a UK company can now have tax liability linked to the carbon emissions of a supplier.

Hussain is clear: “Environmental impact now requires the same level of scrutiny as standards for financial health.”

What this requires is a capability that most finance functions do not currently have: modelling the financial implications of environmental and social risk. Scenario analysis of physical and transition risks. Translating ESG factors into balance sheet numbers with associated risk levels. Stress-testing future robustness against ESG scenarios.

“Traditionally, an organisation analyses how the world affects the business,” Hussain explains. “But now there is increased focus on how the organisation affects the world. Regulators now require an organisation to stress test future robustness, including various ESG factors. If you are a business on the coast, you stress test the effects of sea level rises on your business.”

My transfer pricing work at scale gave me a version of this analytical challenge: building frameworks to identify where value is created within complex multinational structures and put defensible numbers on it under regulatory scrutiny. ESG finance applies the same discipline to different variables and a different regulatory framework. The organisations building this capability now will be ahead of the compliance requirement when it becomes unavoidable.

What this means for finance professionals now

These roles do not require a career change. They require a deliberate capability investment.

The finance professional who develops AI tool literacy and basic technical skills is building toward the prompt engineer role. The one who focuses on communication, commercial translation, and narrative is building toward the storyteller role. The one who invests in sustainability standards and environmental risk modelling is building toward the ESG finance director role.

None of these capabilities sits outside what accounting training covers. All require deliberate development beyond what that training currently provides.

The hiring market data is already showing salary premiums for agentic AI capability, data analytics, and commercial financial reporting. The roles described here are where those skills combinations lead when developed fully. Finance professionals who recognise that and build accordingly are positioning for roles that do not yet exist on a job board but will be critical within a business cycle.