Scenario planning and analytics software company Anaplan boasts a client list including 44% of the Fortune 50. Even Nvidia uses its supply chain planning solutions.
Naturally its CFO, Hemant Kapadia, was eager to talk with CFO Brew about AI and the importance of having clean, structured data. But he also told us about his unusual path to CFO, and about how he strives to build the finance acumen of companies where he’s worked.
From fighter jets to finance: Kapadia, who has a degree in electrical engineering, jokes that he “took the securest path to finance.” After a stint in engineering at GE—where, among other things, he worked on the F-35 fighter jet—he took an accelerator program at that company, earned an MBA, and made the move to internal audit. Kapadia took on different finance roles at GE and then was a CFO for various companies, including SunEdison Semiconductor. He joined Anaplan as CFO in 2022.
Kapadia sees parallels between engineering and finance. Both realms, he observed, require that you be good at math but also “very process-oriented and analytical.”
He hasn’t forgotten the mentorship he received in GE’s accelerator program, though, or the experience of learning accounting in a compressed time frame, which he describes as “drinking from a fire hose.” His experience made him realize that other people at companies he worked for could benefit from financial knowledge. At his past few employers, he said, he’s started informal internal training programs consisting of video calls or recorded videos where he walks viewers through topics such as how to interpret balance sheets and income statements.
It’s “bringing the company along on the journey of why we make certain decisions,” he said. “It’s part of me paying it forward, because someone did it for me.”
News built for finance pros
CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.
A shift in AI priorities: As CFO of a software company, Kapadia is bullish on AI. He’s hearing that customers are looking for AI to “deliver efficiencies,” which, frankly, means reducing headcount.
They’re wondering, “If I had 10 people doing a certain activity, can I do it with four or five?” he said. But he’s also noticing that companies are asking “Can I get to better answers and better-quality outcomes fast?” That’s more important than efficiency, he said, “because in a business environment, hallucinations can be very, very damaging.”
He stresses the importance of clean data, giving the example of having the same SKU for the same item throughout your entire organization.
“Data wrangling and ensuring that you have truly structured data is so important,” he said. It’s vital, he said, that an AI’s training be “based on actual business information” rather than the massive data sets some LLMs are trained on. Hallucinations, he said, “occur when you don’t have structured data.”
Kapadia does feel that “companies are being very methodical and intentional about how they approach” AI. His own business is a case in point. Though Anaplan has ambitious plans to expand its AI agent offerings, internally it’s slowed down AI adoption in order to ensure data security.
“We’re in the data business, so given that there’s a lot of customers’ data on our servers, we want to make sure that any AI solution does not permeate or break that data,” he said.