Ai + CFO Field Report
Bringing You the "Best Of's" from the last 2 weeks of Conferences
Over the last two weeks, I attended two great conferences, the HumanX Ai Conference and the Operators Guild - CFO Summit 2025 Conference.
When I have my own personal “A-Ha” moments at such conferences, I’ve learned to take an iPhone picture of the slide being discussed. This accomplishes a few things for me:
It helps me record another “Best Of” for my own future review.
It now helps any of you readers here who didn’t attend the conference!
This week’s newsletter is designed as my personal field report of what I believe is worthy or sharing with all of you from both conferences.
For any of you who actually attended either conference and saw these same slides, please don’t hesitate to use the “comment” button at the end of this post to add, edit, or supplement this post to make it better for everyone.
And here’s your Easter Egg…since we are talking about “A-Ha” moments:
HumanX Ai Conference: Las Vegas March 9-12, 2025
This was billed as “the best Ai conference of the year”. Well, it was only March, but there were some heavy hitters speaking, being interviewed, and holding masterclass breakouts for the 3,500 or so attendees.
One of the best talks I attended here was on day 1 from Greg Shove, CEO of Section Ai who also had guest speakers Ashley Gross and Edmundo Ortega. All three were amazing presenters - *major hat tip. Here’s a quick screenshot of Greg’s LinkedIn post right after the event. (I’m just off to the left in this picture.)
I began snapping some pics of Greg’s great talk - he gave me permission to share here. We’ve known each other for over 20 years as neighbors, childhood friends, and fellow soccer players. He was one hell of a goalie in his day!
I loved this slide as it was speaking about the CFO Era’s (Part 1, 2, & 3) I just wrote about a few weeks prior:
We Thrived After Spreadsheets. We’ll Thrive with Ai.
In the 1980s, the release of VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and Excel decimated bookkeeping jobs. But analysis, accounting, and finance roles soared.
Key Takeaway:
Just like spreadsheet revolution, Ai will eliminate the need for more roles like bookkeepers, manual entry, and analysts but Ai will also allow current roles to uplevel their game.
The lesson?
You need to immerse yourself and learn how to use Ai quickly. If you were in finance, being a “spreadsheet jockey” and being an expert in intricate functions of Excel (Pivot Tables, Scenario Analysis, Nested IF statements, Arrays, etc) were either a a critical job requirement or a key differentiator that took you to the next level. Ai is no different. Lean in. Rewire your brain. Starting Today!
You’re No Longer the Doer. You’re the Decider. You are the Manager of Ai.
Ai is shifting our value stack. Our job is no longer to manually produce the work, but to frame the right inputs and judge the outputs.
Before Ai: "Do the work."
With AI: "Direct the work."
Important: It’s time to move up the leadership stack in every role in your department. There’s been too much FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about what Ai will do in the future and it’s impacts on current status quo.
Mindshift: You know that new hire you’ve been asking for and keep not getting because of the budget? Well, today, you have a new direct report. It’s called an Ai Agent. Just like you wouldn’t let any new hire run wild, Humans+Ai (Humans in the Loop - Humans being the final judge/jury of these “new hires”) will be critical since our new hires still hallucinate and don’t have any real EQ.
Agents vs. Automation: Know the Difference
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was cool for it’s day. Historically, this was more machine learning Ai and “learned/trained macros” but it was still only automation.
The key phrases I loved here? - “No Adapability” and “It only executes what it was programmed to do” (pre-defined steps).
Today’s Ai talk (and most of the HumanX conference) is now about Ai Agents and Greg’s slide does a brilliant job of differentiating the value of an Ai Agent:
Think and decide (next step actions) indepedently to achieve a goal.
Negotiating vendor contracts via an Ai Email Agent was mind shifting for me.
Ai Agents adjust their actions based on real-time data.
Greg’s next slide brought home the point…
When To Consider Using An Ai Agent:
Don’t forget: “You are the decider” - the Ai’s manager.
Important: Use Ai Agents to do the dirty work of problem solving, but don’t let it make the final decision.
The Risk-Autonomy Continuum
Ai agents should be deployed based on risk and autonomy:
Low-risk: Meeting notes, research assistants, calendar tools
Medium-risk: Marketing agents, customer support
High-risk: Contract negotiation, finance & hiring, trading decisions
IMPORTANT: Start with low-risk use cases and increase your oversight as the risk level of your Ai Agent rises. If you wouldn’t let your direct report make the final decision, then by no means should you let an Ai Agent press the “Final Answer” button.
Human + Ai as partners is a very real and required thing.
The 5 Tiers of Ai Agents
Most companies today are experimenting in Tier 1 or 2. But the leverage lives in Tier 4 and 5.
My take: This slide was speaking my language. I had already written my CFO Architect newsletter and I use “System Thinker” language a lot in many of my previous newsletters.
Roleplay With Your Stakeholders
Use Ai starting today by being creative:
Greg told a story of using Ai to help him role-play his board meetings. He would ask Ai to not just review his board deck but also to “play various board members” who he would profile to Ai.
Greg has been doing this for 6+ months and he’s been “keeping score” on what Ai predicted his board members would say. It blew my mind (and the rest of the audience) when Greg shared the statistics that Ai has gone from being 82% accurate to now 92% accurate! (I failed to get a pic of that slide.)
Key Actionable Insights:
Upload your board deck to Ai and “do what Greg does.” Don’t forget your board members have different personalities, so prompt your Ai role-playing Agent accordingly for board members who are the strategic long-term thinkers vs the ex-CFO board member who wants financial detail.
Do you have a critical internal CEO or Exec Team presentation coming up? Use AI as a sparring partner, not just an editor, summarizer, or thought partner.
What Now? Run this Playbook
Step 1: Audit Workflows
Where are your employees spending time on multi-step decisions?
What tasks feel repeatable but require judgment?
ACTION: Build a list of 10 workflows Ai could take over.
Step 2: Identify Tier 1 or 2 Opportunities
Start where risk is low and value is high.
ACTION: Map opportunities that augment, not replace human decisions.
Step 3: Run Friday Afternoon Learning Labs and Hackathons
I added this one. It wasn’t in Greg’s slides or talk. Hackathons were a “thing” at Mozilla - a chance to innovate together. It’s time for your to run regular Ai Hackathons with your team so everyone can learn together.
Step 4: Test and Pilot
Build a small Ai Agent Test for one of your team’s workflows.
Controlled rollout.
Iterate fast, get real time feedback from internal customers, rinse-repeat-next version.
ACTION: Assign an internal Ai SWAT team to pilot.
KEY QUESTION: Who on your team has the most passion for Ai? Who is the curious learner on your team. They belong on your new Ai SWAT team.
Final Thought:
CFOs, finance teams, and operators aren’t being replaced. We’re being promoted to Ai Coaches!
Our future job (our next Era) is to:
Ask more powerful questions.
Define better inputs.
Judge the Ai Agent outputs with context, foresight, and intution.
Ai isn’t a threat. It’s a multiplier.
KEY CFO INSIGHT: Start with your own finance department and once you get the “PlayBook” down, this is where you can immediately step into partnering with other departments to “give them headcount” in the form of new Ai Agents. You will also immediately start to be leveled up in your executive team’s mind as “more technical” and more “product-oriented.”
The slide below brought this home. This one was from Edmundo who was “ranting” about how SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) will be more important than ever in an Ai Agentic World. That SME = YOU! Edmundo argues that SME’s will be more important in the future product development teams than the product/project manager, the developer, designer, or data engineer.
Remember how I constantly talk about CFO’s and the finance department sitting at the unique intersection of all company activity?
Now is our time. We are the SME’s of the business. Ai is the technology we’ve been waiting for. Let that sink in. We are the new Architects of the business - the CFO Architects. So of course I just did the “hip thing” and asked for an image from ChatGPT!
Another fun Easter Egg buried way down here in this post….
Below:
Edmundo provided his own playbook as he elaborated on and emphasized the importance of simply starting today or tomorrow at the latest.
Being a fan of playbooks, I obviously snapped a picture:
My Take: Calling All CFO’s or VP’s of Finance
Open your checkbook. Pay for a ChatGPT or equivalent account for everyone in your department.
Require they use it weekly and hold Monday morning “Learning Labs” over coffee where everyone is required to share back their own evolutionary learning from the last week or weekend of experimenting.
CRITICAL: Get your hands dirty and get your teams to learn from each other « This is the fastest path to expertise.
Here’s your flywheel for adopting Ai:
Prep: Find your Ai champions. Assess and audit workflows to find Ai use cases.
Train: Learning labs and hackathons - led by your champions.
Deploy: Launch something, anything. As Reid Hoffman has famously said, “if you aren’t embarrassed by your new launched versions, you’ve launched too late.” Launching allows for speed learning. The next version will always be better. Version 1 always sucks.
Track: Monitor adoption and measure success.
Rinse/Repeat: Keep the flywheel going.
Repeat after Greg and repeat after me: Ai IS NOT CHEATING.
It’s a new language, a new capability - just like software coding was over the last 40+ years. Was using a calculator in school cheating? It used to be thought of that way.
Teach your kids that Ai is not cheating. It’s a requirement for future success.
Greg told a great story where he asks every interviewing candidate whether they used Ai to prep for the interview. The ones that say “No” are immediately disqualfied. Another A-Ha moment landed by Greg.
Greg ended his presentation with this slide which brilliantly captures our future: If you can’t quite see it, that’s a human (you) in front on the tandem bike.
The HumanX Ai Conference was a whirlwind 3-day immersion.
The Operators Guild CFO Summit Day: March 19, 2025 - Kabuki Hotel - SF
Last week I was asked to be the day 1, session 1 kick-off speaker for the Operators Guild CFO Summit Day - 1 full day of immersion in all things CFO with 100 top CFOs in the room.
I gave the room my “Best Of’s” with respect to historical CFO Eras, CFO Required Capabilities and Behaviors by Stage, and introduced the CFO Scorecard. Readers of my last 3-part series would have recognized every word. Many of these CFOs hadn’t read my Substack yet…….
For a behind-the-scenes of the OG CFO Summit - become a paid subscriber. There are a ton of benefits, and the price is cheap compared to the value provided. PLUS, if you become a paid subscriber right now, you’ll gain immediate access to the remainder of this blog below.
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