How CFOs used AI this year

This year, AI took over the corporate office. Every industry, sector, and department raced (or was pushed) to integrate AI into workflows in pursuit of productivity (if not cost-effectiveness).

Throughout the year, CFO Brew collected insights from finance chiefs on how they deployed AI across software, processes, financial analysis, and auditing. There was one CFO who used gift cards to encourage creative AI use on their teams. Another had AI transform the finance workflow.

We asked CFOs from a variety of companies and industries to tell us how they and their teams used AI this year. Here are the most revealing takeaways.

Kelly Steckelberg, CFO of Canva

For us, it has been a huge unlock. My team uses it every day to make our work smoother and faster, and it is helping us get through things that used to feel impossible…For example, we are now using AI to synthesize large datasets, stress test financial scenarios, and automate transaction processing and reconciliations. AI gets the heavy lifting started, which saves us a lot of time on manual tasks and gives the team more space to focus on the analysis that really needs human judgment.

AI is not new for us at Canva...It has freed us up to focus on higher-value projects, and it has made me step back and think about what the finance team and systems of the future should look like.

Michelle Chang, CFO of Zoom

In our tax department, customers used to be calling in or writing in with all of these tax questions. And basically, we’ve used our virtual agent product from Zoom, which is essentially meant to be a customer support virtual agent to, in essence, answer these questions. We pointed them toward our own internal reference material. We obviously made sure there was a human in the loop and all of those things to get quality results. But we’ve taken down dramatically answering the same questions all the time. Now they’re much more able to look at the tax strategy of the company…I’m able to consume a lot more information so that I can come in and analyze with more of an outside-in perspective.

Juho Parkkinen, CFO of Burning Man Project

We use [AI] to analyze various different things. It’s still in its infancy, but some use cases include traffic management, porta potty placement, things like that. Obviously your low-hanging fruit like document reviews are obvious, but we are trying to figure out ways to enhance some of the operations with AI as well.

Erica Gessert, CFO of Upwork

The places where you get the best bang for your buck, by far, are AI research tools: competitive and industrial research, comparative research around urban financial strength and architecture. I think the most important and innovative thing that we’re building is going to be natural language interface over our own metadata. That will enable everyone in the company to easily access and visualize all of the data that we have within the company now. It’s not an easy project, especially for CFOs, because of access rights…We have to work through some of those issues.

Hetu Patel, CFO of Thrive Market

One is largely to get some of the macro trends: With earnings season, what are the macro trends to stay up to speed on what’s impacting other businesses like ours? It’s super powerful versus where you would have to go through transcripts and financials. The power of getting a lot of synthesized insight across publicly available materials.

Josh Schauer, CFO of Insightsoftware

You just use it very much as a thought partner, because it’s oftentimes very lonely as a CFO. And you’ve just got your team you bounce ideas off of and it’s just nice to have another tool to be there to look out for you.

Leanna Rossmann, CFO at South by Southwest

For my team’s role, we use [AI] anywhere between doing research on sales tax code. We’re going through a sales tax audit. It’s doing AI fact-checking on tax code, researching so it can be pulled up quickly rather than digging through Google…I actually use it for various economic trends of what’s happening all over the world and how certain things may impact us: Could tariffs impact us? What could affect travel?

Dominique Highfield, CFO of Bloom & Wild

We’re growing into nonflower gifting. We’re growing into different categories like alcohol, sugar, and baby toys. So how can we make sure that we’re compliant with all of these in these growing markets that we’re in? We’re using AI to help us horizon scan and identify risks.