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

CFOs are getting warmer on their own businesses, even as they grow more skeptical of markets, the economy and the tech they’re rushing to use. Deloitte’s latest CFO Signals survey, based on 200 North American finance chiefs at companies with at least $1 billion in revenue, found confidence rising to 6.1 from 5.9 last quarter, which pushed the score back into “high” territory.

That confidence is not broad optimism. It’s local. Ninety percent of respondents said they felt more upbeat about their own companies’ financial prospects, yet risk appetite slipped, with 53% saying now is a good time to take greater risks, down from 59% in the second quarter. Views on debt and equity barely moved, which suggests the bigger shift is in mood, not financing theory.

The sharpest swing was in how CFOs see U.S. stocks. Eighty-three percent now say equity markets are overvalued, up from 49% in Q2. Ed Hardy, Deloitte’s U.S. financial services leader, said that kind of valuation pressure is pushing finance chiefs to look for the highest use of capital. He tied that directly to more AI investment.

AI is where the optimism and anxiety meet. Technology deployment, including generative AI, was one of the top internal concerns, while cybersecurity led the external-risk list at 50%. Hardy said the two are linked, especially as companies lean on open platforms and third-party models. The survey was collected from Aug. 24 to Sept. 8, before the Federal Reserve’s Sept. 16 rate decision, so the next quarter may tell a different story.

Looking further out, Hardy expects CFOs to keep moving AI from experiment to “really grounded applications” in 2027, while wrestling with governance, token-based pricing and how to measure whether any of it actually pays off. He also said finance is becoming the convener across the enterprise, which is a polite way of saying someone has to count the money before the slide deck gets too excited.