There's a technology gap emerging in the practice of finance, but it's not exactly what you think it would be. A recently released AFP survey reveals a significant gap between how important finance professionals rate emerging technology, and what they're prepared to do to embrace emerging technology.

The survey even suggests this gap-let's call it "the stasis gap"-is growing, and that's a worrisome sign.

When asked, "Are organizations prepared to deal with the impact of new technologies within the treasury and finance function?" only 11 percent answered either "very prepared" or "fully prepared." A whopping 53 percent of respondents said their organizations were "somewhat prepared"; another 36 percent said "minimally or not prepared."

It's an alarming finding, given the stakes. Each day brings us new revelations of digital disruption in our world. In November, the New York Times brought us word of a machine learning project "that learns to build other machine-learning algorithms." Around the same time, Deloitte released a study claiming some 26,000 projects relied on blockchain technology in 2016 alone. DataBridge Market Research estimates that robotic process automation (RPA)-a $698.5 billion market in 2016-will account for nearly 29 percent of compound annual growth rate over the next seven years.