The band Paramore is in the business of misery, cows are in the business of mooing, ghosts are in the business of spooking.

CFOs, meanwhile, are in the uncertainty business, or more specifically, the forecasting business. And in the tumultuous times we currently live in, that’s becoming an increasingly difficult undertaking—with the consequences of getting it wrong reverberating in new ways.

“If you’re kind of close to your forecast—either above or below—you’re in fairly good shape,” Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a founding director of the closely watched Duke-CFO survey, told CFO Brew.

However, in periods of great uncertainty, “you can make the forecast, but you have very little confidence in that forecast,” he explained. “And what that means is that there’s a high probability that what actually happens could be much different than your forecast, and that’s where the company gets into trouble.”

No one is debating that we’re in an uncertain environment. “Is there a lot of uncertainty today? Definitely,” Harvey said. And in a sense, the prevalence of uncertainty is what makes agreeing on a definition tricky; CFOs are attributing a range of outcomes to uncertainty, but potentially using the term in different ways.

What does uncertainty really mean these days?—NP

AI adoption is reaching a new phase, Salesforce COFO Robin Washington said during a recent roundtable: one where companies are separating the wheat from the chaff.

Businesses are moving out of the “experimentation” stage and starting to “really decide what are the true value-enhancing AI opportunities that exist,” Washington said. She recommends that companies use “cross-functional teams” to determine which use cases for AI they “want to continue to experiment on, and which ones [they] want to mature and accelerate.”

During the roundtable, she and Paypal COFO Jamie Miller suggested that the next frontier is AI for revenue generation, not just improving efficiency. The examples Miller gave, though, were fairly high-level; she noted that “agentic commerce” could let consumers have an “end-to-end experience in a much different way.”

Are we all vibe coders now? Washington and Miller leaned on the theme of jobs shifting, rather than going away, due to AI. Washington mentioned that AI can complete more of the redundant and time-consuming tasks, which, she said, “unleashes the ability for us to really do our jobs.” That’s allowed Salesforce to “reallocate employees to more value-add type of activities where we see, directionally, growth is coming from,” she said. Miller said she’s seen a similar “reallocation” of employees’ tasks at PayPal.

How are Fortune 500 companies deploying AI?—CV

Coworking is a recurring segment where we talk to CFOs and other leaders in the finance space about their experiences, their companies, and the larger economy. Let us know if you are—or you know—a CFO we should interview.

As energy costs soar, CFOs are looking for new, more cost-efficient energy sources. Hydrogen energy has long held the unrealized promise of scalable clean energy, but historically, producing it has been expensive and difficult.

Vema Hydrogen, an early stage hydrogen energy company, has developed a production process that reduces the cost significantly.

CFO Brew recently spoke with Vema CFO Jim Kueser about being the CFO of a small startup, rising energy prices, and producing clean energy post-IRA cuts.

There has been some recent discussion of an oncoming recession. How are you as CFO preparing for that?

We’re in a different position a little bit because we are a pre-revenue organization, so in a recession you’re worried about your cash flow and revenue streams. Obviously, we don’t have those yet. We are effectively a cost center until we’re generating revenue. So we have a little different view.

We believe that we are going to be producing a product that is not as impacted by recessionary trends. There is a need for clean fuels that we don’t think is going to go away, and notwithstanding the potential downturn of the economy, there is going to be a demand for those clean fuels, but they must be in the form of a reliable supply and at an acceptable cost…We’re not seeking the green premium. We are seeking to be competitive with alternative forms of energy.

Click here to continue reading.—JK

How are CFOs staying sharp in a world of mounting regulation, risk, and data pressure? Join us Sept. 16 in NYC (or virtually) for a morning of expert panels featuring leaders from Affirm, Navan, and Pagaya—plus many more—breaking down the big shifts reshaping finance. Register here.