It’s been about six months since ChatGPT took the world by storm, and finance professionals are working to understand how it will affect them and their organizations. One place that generative AI tools like ChatGPT could have an immediate impact on finance professionals is in Excel, a bedrock tool for the finance function for decades.

To find out how the intersection of Excel and AI may change the work of financial professionals in the months and years to come, CFO Brew spoke to Jeff Lenning, Microsoft Excel MVP and Microsoft Certified Trainer at Excel University, an online training platform.

Lenning got early previews of some of the new AI-based functionality that’s already come online for Excel users, and has been training his students with new chat-enabled methods. After working with the new features, Lenning already sees their potential, even for power users.

“It’s really just helping people to be more productive,” he said. “There’s a shortage of people anyway, so to the extent we can leverage these tools to get our work done faster, I think that makes sense.”

AI technology likely isn’t going to replace any financial analysis jobs entirely in the near future, but Lenning said learning how to incorporate these tools is vital for finance professionals looking for job security.

Keep reading.—SW

It’s already mid-May, which means you’re in the thick of quarter-end reporting, revising H2 forecasts, and gearing up for 2024. But let’s face it: There’s little time for strategic planning when you’re buried in the same tedious tasks.

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Do you remember how to calculate free cash flow? How about the cost of carry? Well, if you don’t, there’s help out there. The latest trend on finance LinkedIn is for experts to produce splashy “cheat sheets” that can keep that information and more, right where you need it.

While they can be useful, all of these cheat sheets should come with a “buyer beware” warning. You should probably always look for additional sources whenever you’re doing important work, recognizing that these cheat sheets could be wrong for your situation, for a variety of reasons: A mix of typos might have crept in at any point in creating these cheat sheets, and there are differing approaches to some of the calculations they discuss (such as how to compute customer lifetime value at a high-growth startup) that can’t be quickly summarized.

But they can also be useful. To help you sort through the avalanche of information out there, here are three that caught our eye, and what they have to share.

Nicolas Boucher’s Finance Cheat Sheet: One of the more comprehensive offerings out there, this offers the formulas for 90 different key performance indicators. It also devotes substantial real estate to describing the financial organization, from job titles and hierarchy to methods and skills required for different positions. One of the more surprising pieces is a section on “Financial terms explained to non-finance people.” Try them out on your friends and family, and let us know if they work.

Continue reading.—SW

With generative AI still captivating the tech world, some companies are throwing around large sums of money in an effort to demonstrate their seriousness about the technology’s future.

One of the latest of these announcements came from accounting and consulting giant PwC, which recently said it would put $1 billion toward scaling its own AI capabilities as well as helping its clients do the same over the next three years.

The company’s investment includes access to Microsoft’s OpenAI Azure cloud platform and OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The goals of the multiyear pledge are to provide more funding for AI-related projects and train the company’s workforce as a whole in the use of the tech.

“We had a lot of debate about what’s the right scale of investment, as you can imagine, but we truly believe that AI is going to be transformative to industries in the way work gets done,” Joe Atkinson, PwC’s vice chair and chief products and technology officer, told Tech Brew.

Keep reading on Tech Brew.—PK

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 4.9%. That’s how much the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose in April, a sign that inflation is cooling. This marks the 10th month in a row that inflation has fallen, although it is still more than double the Fed’s target inflation rate of 2%. (the New York Times)

Quote: “I’m often asked questions—if the debt ceiling is not raised, what would you do? And I don’t want to go there and discuss alternatives. There are choices to be made, if we got into that situation. But as you think about each possible thing that we could do, the answer is there is no good alternative that will save us from catastrophe.”—Janet Yellen on the options in the event of an US debt default. (the Wall Street Journal)

Read: Consumer spending is still keeping the economy afloat but there are signs that it is weakening as Americans save less and take on more debt. (CNBC)

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