This CFO vibe-coded a multi-agent that works overnight

A small, almost 90-year-old nonprofit organization might not be the place you’d expect to find cutting-edge AI. But thanks to its CFO, the Jewish Federation of San Diego has a fleet of agents handling multiple accounting and finance tasks.

CFO David Fuhriman, who joined the Federation in January 2025, used open source AI assistant OpenClaw to develop H2, a system that connects the organization’s data to software programs it uses, including Salesforce, Sage Intacct, and accounting platform Numeric. The platform “reconciles overnight, runs flux analysis, and drafts audit response memos,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post, and, as he told CFO Brew, creates sub-agents that it delegates tasks to.

H2 can log into Numeric on its own, Fuhriman said, “and help prepare month-end schedules on [our] behalf.” Overnight, he said, it can pull data from various systems to reconcile items needed for the close, and in the morning, employees review its work.

Crucially, H2 helps AI understand the context around the natural-language terms that different staff in a nonprofit might use, Fuhriman said. A development officer, for instance, might ask Claude very literally, “Where are we at in the fundraising campaign?” A human staffer would understand the context around that request, or know to ask follow-up questions, but an AI might not. “That information has to sit somewhere and it doesn’t sit inside Salesforce, so that’s this H2 layer,” he said.

H2 enables him to treat agents like employees, Fuhriman told CFO Brew. “I can direct them like I direct staff, and I can manage the results, and I can give feedback on the results, and I can implement the vision for what I see.” He expects the same work from them as he would from an accountant, and verifies it in the same way, he said.

The ROI. Implementing AI means the Federation no longer has to use consultants for Salesforce or accounting, Fuhriman said, “which has led to some significant savings.”

As far as his seven-person finance staff, he often has discussions with them about how AI is affecting their jobs. “If I automate my whole gift [donation] entry process that I do every single day, what does that mean for me as a person?,” he asks by way of example. “What am I replacing or backfilling it with?” But there’s still no lack of work, Fuhriman said. “I feel like there’s infinite work in nonprofits generally,” he said, and AI gives staff time to tackle tasks that have “sat on the back burner.”

How he built it. Fuhriman, who has a background in accounting, finance, IT, tech, and entrepreneurship, said he first became interested in AI when LLMs took off. At that time, “Everybody sort of had that ChatGPT moment,” he said. “And it started to feel like, ‘Oh, I can see where this is going.’”

He felt empowered to build by the new wave of AI tools that have come out in recent months. “I can build as a CFO. I can build what’s in my mind,” he realized. He likens using the coding tools to working with a software team. “You don’t have to write [the code] yourself, but you can direct others to do it. And I’ve been doing that my whole career,” he said.

CFOs, Fuhriman believes, “should really understand what is happening in the [AI] field and what capabilities exist, so that they can really lead the work inside their organizations.” He and his team have pursued formal learning, such as Salesforce and Anthropic Academy certificate programs, but he encourages CFOs to experiment as well. “Just play with it and try things,” he suggested.