AI use cases and the necessity of good data were hot topics at this year’s Workiva Amplify conference. And while experts discussed at length all the promised disruption and innovation, they acknowledged they were still working out how to measure return on their AI investment.

The main hangup? It’s difficult to quantify time savings and risk reduction.

“We are constantly looking at the return on investment and what the output is actually giving us in return,” Heather Holding, chief risk officer of consumer loan fintech Best Egg, said at a panel session. AI is a clear time-saver for Best Egg employees, she said, but putting that into dollars and cents is more difficult.

“We’re really trying to figure out a way to measure, to be honest with you,” Holding said. “It’s very hard to measure efficiency with the AI tools today, and that’s something we’re trying to get our heads around. But it’s something that you are all going to have to figure out.”

It’s easier to measure a capital investment that helps a manufacturer produce more items within a given period of time, Alexander Davis, deputy CFO of Pie Insurance, told CFO Brew. It’s more difficult to show ROI when the investment has less tangible outcomes, like when AI helps eliminate risk of making an error in an earnings report or a material misstatement in a financial statement.

Click here for more on measuring AI ROI.—AZ

The beef between Sam Altman and Elon Musk now involves a CFO.

Altman’s OpenAI has hired Mike Liberatore, formerly CFO at Musk’s xAI, CNBC reported on Tuesday. Liberatore worked at xAI for just three months before departing in July of this year. Several other high-profile staff members have left xAI in recent weeks, including cofounder Igor Babuschkin and general counsel Robert Keele.

At OpenAI, Liberatore will have the title of business finance officer and report to CFO Sarah Friar. He’ll help craft the company’s strategy for “its massive infrastructure spending,” according to CNBC. Recently, OpenAI struck a deal to buy $300b worth of computing power from Oracle over a period of about five years. As the Wall Street Journal observed, the deal “far outstrips the startup’s current revenue.” OpenAI lost $5 billion last year, but said it had $10 billion in ARR this year.

Liberatore joins OpenAI at a time when the company, a nonprofit, says it’s getting closer to completing a transformation into a more typical for-profit company. The startup has wrangled with Microsoft, its primary funder, over the terms of the shift, and needs Microsoft to sign off on the change by the end of the year or lose $20 billion, CFO Dive reported.

Feuding founders: The hiring of Liberatore is just the latest twist in a longstanding feud between Musk and Altman. The two CEOs were once friends who cofounded OpenAI in 2015, but the bromance ultimately soured, and Musk founded competing startup xAI. He and wealthy backers made an unsuccessful bid to buy a controlling stake in OpenAI for $97 billion, and he’s sued to prevent OpenAI from becoming a for-profit company.

For more on how the Altman-Musk feud ensnared a CFO, click here.—CV

We knew they had it in ’em.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve cut rates for the first time since December, as an increasingly thorny economic picture emerges.

The central bank reduced the federal funds rate to a range of 4% to 4.25%, down from 4.25% to 4.5%.

Though the decision was widely expected, it wasn’t unanimous. There was one dissenting vote from Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran, an economic adviser to President Trump who was confirmed by the Senate just hours before the Fed’s latest policy meeting started. Miran advocated for a half-point cut.

In addition to Wednesday’s cut, the Fed signaled that two more rate cuts could come later this year, with only one currently estimated for 2026.

The horns of a dilemma. The central bank is currently tasked with attempting to thread the needle on a complex economic landscape, somehow bringing down elevated inflation amid a weakening job market.

What does the rate cut mean for CFOs?—NP

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Director of Finance at TheASPTeam (in person)
• Chief Lending Officer at a bank (in person)
• Financial Analyst at an undisclosed organization (in person)
• Senior Finance Analyst at Canon Info Technology Services (hybrid)
• Senior Accountant at Teal Becker & Chiaramonte CPAs (hybrid)