CFO's Road to Superintelligence
If you lead finance and want to stay relevant in the next 12 months, you need to:
Sam Altman says:
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence…
Those aren’t movie lines. They’re a warning.
And if you’re a CFO, that sentence should grab you like a jolt of electricity.
AI is going exponential and business stakes are growing just as fast.
GPT-5 is coming this year.
OpenAI is building its own chips.
Meta is offering $100M+ for top researchers.
Scientific breakthroughs are being generated by AI agents.
Meanwhile, most finance teams are still debating whether to pilot a Copilot.
This newsletter is your wake-up call.
If you lead finance and want to stay relevant in the next 12 months, you need to:
See where this is heading.
Change your budget and priorities.
Lead the AI strategy, not lag behind it.
Read on.
GPT-5 is coming. New models will arrive faster and cost less
Altman hinted, GPT-5 is nearly ready.
It could:
Blend reasoning with creativity.
Handle longer context windows.
Replace many narrow tools with one universal agent.
And these upgrades aren’t annual. They’re quarterly now.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is building its own chips, just like Apple did to control iPhone performance.
Microsoft is investing $80B. Meta, $60B.
Consider this: AI + silicon + infrastructure.
CFOs must understand the price-to-performance ratio of AI is about to tilt massively in your favor.
Smart companies will get 10x leverage for 2x the cost.
But only if they’re ready.
Meta's $100M signing bonuses
AI is a talent war now
Meta reportedly offered nine-figure compensation packages to lure OpenAI researchers. $100M+ for a single person.
Sam Altman says: Meta started making giant offers... $100M signing bonuses... I’m really happy none of our best people took it.
Zuckerberg didn’t make that offer for fun.
He did it because one great AI hire can change the entire trajectory of a business.
Meta also just poured $14.8B into Scale AI, essentially an acqui-hire of Alexandr Wang, who will now lead their superintelligence division.
These aren’t moonshots. They’re battle plans.
That’s what CFOs must internalize: AI expertise is now enterprise strategy.
Would you pay $1M to cut costs by $100M next year?
That’s the math these companies are running. They’re not betting on hype. They’re betting on margin expansion, product velocity, and cost structure dominance, driven by AI.
If CFOs aren’t budgeting for AI talent or tools, you’re not budgeting for survival.
AI is moving from automation to invention
Old AI: automate routine tasks.
New AI: generate new scientific insights.
Altman predicts that by 2026, AI systems will:
Discover new drugs
Propose novel materials
Solve physics problems
Some early models already are.
One GPT-style model suggested a new wastewater pathogen detection method no human had considered. Another contributed original hypotheses in nuclear fusion.
Google’s AlphaFold predicted protein structures that once took years. That alone is transforming drug discovery.
So this is more than automation. This is discovery.
Imagine your competitors compressing a decade of R&D into a year.
Innovation cycles are shrinking.
Don’t wait for product teams to figure it out.
You should be asking:
How do we fund, pilot, and scale AI innovation now?
How to set up your ChatGPT to think like a CFO in 10 minutes
Custom instructions are your secret weapon.
Everyone is all-in. Are you?
The top 4 tech giants are spending $315B+ in AI and cloud CapEx in 2025.
That’s more than the GDP of 139 countries.
This is not just about models. It’s data, chips, apps, teams, and acquisitions.
Google’s Gemini. Microsoft Copilot. Salesforce Einstein. Adobe Firefly. Open-source players are racing alongside.
Every product in every industry is getting AI embedded.
And every company will either
a) Lead their category with AI.
b) Get disrupted by someone who does.
So the risk isn’t overspending on AI.
It’s underinvesting and getting blindsided.
How to hit profitability and run scenarios with 3 AI Prompts
Once, FP&A was the quiet engine room of the business. Crunching numbers. Reconciling budgets. Running static plans that were outdated the moment they shipped.
You Have to Train Your Team, Starting Now
McKinsey says those at bigger companies are more than twice as likely as their small-company peers to say their companies have built clearly defined road maps to drive adoption of gen AI solutions (such as through phased rollouts across teams and business units) and to have built a dedicated team (such as a project management or transformation office) to drive gen AI adoption.
You have 2 choices:
Pay a fortune to compete for the few AI experts that exist
Train the people you already have.
For most companies, the second choice is smarter, cheaper, and more effective. You can't build a strong company on a few hired superstars.
You need a whole team that understands how to use AI.
The new AI tools are becoming easier to use, but your employees need to be taught how. If they aren’t trained, your company will own powerful tools that nobody knows how to use.
What this means for you: Investing in your people is the best investment you can make.
Build a training plan. Work with your department heads to teach your employees what AI is and how it can help them in their specific jobs.
Start with your finance team. Your own team can use AI to improve financial forecasts, find risks, and work faster. Make them your first success story.
CFOs can build a forecasting app in 5 minutes with ChatGPT 4.1
You needed a new forecasting tool. Or a dashboard to monitor costs. Or just a tool that would automate those same manual reports you run every month. Something to make your life easier. Something that would give your team time to focus on strategic work instead of stitching together numbers.
The Bottom Line
The race to win in AI has become a desperate, high-stakes game. The biggest companies in the world are telling you that if they don’t become #1 in AI, they believe they won’t survive.
You have to ask yourself:
Can you afford to lose your best tech people? It will cost a fortune to replace them.
Is your hiring budget realistic? The budget you set six months ago is likely out of date. You need to look at it again today.
How are you keeping your team happy? The best defense is to make sure your key people don't want to leave in the first place.
You can no longer afford to "wait and see." While you are waiting, your competitors are trying out these new tools.
Start small projects now. Don't wait for a perfect plan. Let your teams experiment with new AI tools so you can learn what works for your business.
Ask your team, How would our business change if our biggest competitor started using this AI? The answer will show you where you are most at risk.
And that’s all for today.
See you on Thursday!
CFO’s AI Playbook: How to use AI safely without risking sensitive data
If you've felt a twinge of panic about plugging your company’s actuals into ChatGPT, you're not alone. CFOs, controllers, and FP&A leaders everywhere are caught between excitement and fear.
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I’m Wouter Born. A CFOTech investor, advisor, and founder of finstory.ai
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