83% of CFOs say U.S. stocks are overvalued, even as optimism about their companies rises

Deloitte’s Q3 2026 CFO Signals survey, which polled 200 North American finance chiefs at companies with at least $1 billion in revenue, found that the CFO Confidence Score climbed to 6.1 from 5.9 last quarter, moving back into “high” territory.

Ninety percent of respondents said they were more optimistic about their companies’ financial prospects, even as risk appetite cooled slightly, with 53% saying now is a good time to take greater risks, down from 59% in Q2. But Ed Hardy, U.S. financial services leader at Deloitte, noted that CFOs’ views on the relative attractiveness of debt and equity financing changed little.

More striking to Hardy was the gap between how CFOs view their own businesses and how they view the broader market. There was a sharp increase in the share of CFOs who believe U.S. equity markets are overvalued: 83%, compared with 49% in Q2. Despite that, equity attractiveness remained flat in Q3, while debt attractiveness increased four percentage points.

“If they feel it’s overvalued, buying might not be the most objective thing to do,” Hardy told me, adding that elevated valuations are prompting finance chiefs to “search for the highest use of capital,” which is a dynamic he connects to rising investment in AI.

AI and technology are also becoming a growing source of both opportunity and risk. Technology deployment, including generative AI, was among CFOs’ leading internal concerns, while cybersecurity topped the external-risk list at 50%. Hardy said the two are closely linked. “AI probably starts to increase your already heightened concern around cyber,” he said, pointing to the growing use of open platforms and third-party models.

Meanwhile, CFOs’ 12-month outlook for the North American economy slipped slightly but remained generally steady compared with Q2. Inflation, supply chain disruption and the economy itself ranked among their leading external concerns, trailing cybersecurity.

Survey data collection started Aug. 24 and wrapped Sept. 8, before the Federal Reserve’s Sept. 16 rate decision, leaving open how CFO sentiment might shift in the next quarter. “You always wonder whether it’s embedded into the psyche of where they think the market’s going,” Hardy said. He added that he’ll be watching closely to see whether economic and geopolitical uncertainty eases into 2027.

Looking ahead to 2027, Hardy said he expects CFOs to keep pushing AI “beyond experiment into really grounded applications,” while wrestling with governance, shifting token-based pricing models and how to measure real benefits. “The CFO role is increasing in being a convener across the enterprise,” he said, as finance takes on broader oversight of AI’s costs and outcomes.

Sheryl Estrada
[email protected]

Leaderboard

Jennifer Hays was appointed CFO of Gunnison Copper Corp., effective Oct. 12, the mining company known for its flagship Gunnison Copper Project and Johnson Camp Mine in Arizona announced. She succeeds Fabio Rocha, who has served as interim CFO and will be promoted to senior director of accounting and reporting. Hays brings roughly 20 years of finance experience across the U.S. defense industrial base and government contracting. She most recently served as CFO of PacSci EMC, a defense and space company within Ralliant Corp. Before that, Hays spent about 17 years at Intel Corp. in senior finance roles.

Ivica Maric will succeed Yves Müller as CFO and chief operating officer of Hugo Boss AG. Müller is leaving the managing board for personal reasons, stepping down at his own request effective Oct. 1. He has served as CFO since December 2017 and added the COO title in May 2022, during which time he helped lead the company’s CLAIM 5 growth strategy. Maric, a Hugo Boss veteran since 2005, most recently served as executive vice president of business operations and will assume both roles upon Müller’s departure.

Big Deal

A new Gallup and Microsoft survey of 37 countries finds that positive feelings about AI outweigh negative ones in 34 of them, even though a median of 57% of adults globally have never used the technology.

Optimism runs highest in China, where 93% expect AI to mostly help their country, and Vietnam, at 91%, while its lowest in Bangladesh (34%), Egypt (35%) and the U.S. (36%). Notably, wealthy Western nations—including the U.S., Netherlands and Canada—combine some of the highest AI usage rates with the highest levels of worry, with 74% of U.S. adults aware of AI saying it makes them feel worried, more than any other country surveyed.

But that anxiety fades with familiarity: across nearly every country, daily AI users report significantly less worry and more trust in the technology’s accuracy than infrequent or non-users, suggesting adoption and comfort with AI are closely linked, even if Gallup notes the survey can’t determine which drives the other.

Going deeper

The Fortune AIQ 75 list was released this morning. The list ranks Fortune 500 companies generating significant, measurable impact from AI adoption.The ranking draws on ServiceNow’s Enterprise AI Maturity Index, an annual framework that benchmarks how prepared organizations are to adopt and scale AI across the public and private sectors, from governance and data foundations to automation and workflows.

To ground the list in comparable, real-world evidence, Fortune partnered with Enterprise Technology Research to evaluate how Fortune 500 companies are actually deploying AI, and how technology leaders value those investments relative to industry peers.

View the complete list here.

Overheard

“These days most of my time goes on one thing: persuading people who have technical skill to point it at something that matters. It’s the conversation I wish I’d had earlier in my career.”