CFO Brew joined a crowd of corporate finance practitioners who recently descended on the Gaylord National convention center in Washington, DC, for Workiva’s 2025 Amplify conference.
Surprise, surprise: The prevailing topic this year was AI. Thought leaders and attendees waxed poetic on the technology’s potential to transform all facets of corporate finance. But existential talk is one thing. Practical use is another.
That was one of the prevailing questions during the three-day conference: How exactly are accounting, audit, and reporting teams using AI? As it turned out, the use cases flowed as freely as the coffee.
Oh, the possibilities. Amplify was like a Golden Corral of use cases—there was a little something for everyone. Here are some of the highlights.
The internal audit team at financial services firm StoneX uses AI tools to help write data queries and then check the results for accuracy and completeness, Jeanne Cline, StoneX’s chief audit executive, said during a panel session.
Consumer loan fintech Best Egg’s risk management team used AI to write first drafts in a series of eight policies, Chief Risk Officer Heather Holding said. “I was actually able to do them in a day,” she told session attendees. “Of course, obviously my team had to look at it and refine it and make sure that it was good for the organization.”
AI also helps Holding’s team sift through competitors’ SEC reports to identify emerging risk trends. This type of analysis can help organizations game-plan “what you can actually do to get ahead of the risk that your other partners are already seeing,” she said.
Alexander Davis, deputy CFO of Pie Insurance, told CFO Brew that he uses AI to easily tweak commentary based on the intended audience.
“If I’m writing the same slide for the finance team, leadership team, and the board, it’s the same numbers with three different levels of story,” Davis explained. AI makes it easier and quicker to tailor that information to different recipients, he said.
Pie’s finance team is also using AI to more quickly analyze new guidance or standards from regulators like FASB and NAIC.
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“We’re using less of our time and less of the auditors’ time, because we have a pinpointed approach,” Davis said.
Starting small, thinking big. By and large, organizations have gotten good at using AI for “mundane tasks,” but are thinking bigger for future implementations, Mike Callino, customer engagement platform Braze’s senior director of internal audit, told eventgoers. Audit professionals will, over the next 12 to 18 months, start identifying where they can deploy AI tools into regular workflows “for planning, field work, reporting, [and] remediation…to make that process so much more efficient and drive greater gains in the audit function.”
“I think there will be a big play on agentic solutions in each part of the process,” Callino said.
In the meantime, finance leaders want to show off the potential of AI through some bite-sized immediate improvements.
Junko Swain, chief accounting officer at Workiva, said she encourages her team to “start small” and get a “quick win, and a quick benefit from using AI in a secured environment.” This strategy, she explained, helps workers become comfortable with the technology before the bigger changes take hold within the organization.
“We are taking baby steps,” Swain told CFO Brew. “We talk about AI, but actual adoption of AI itself takes time, because it requires such huge change management.”
Similarly, StoneX is in the “individual production stage” of AI, where employees are getting comfortable with using the AI tools, according to Cline. The company’s next steps will be to embed AI more broadly into various departments and workflows, “making a whole process more efficient and effective than just the individual,” she said.
Experts cautioned that AI is only as good as the data it’s being fed. The next installment in CFO Brew’s chronicling of all the hot AI topics at Amplify will dive deeply into that challenge, and relay the best practices as told by experts.