How to become an AI-native CFO
Roadmap to becoming an AI-native CFO
Today’s letter is all about the spicy grilled insights shared yesterday at the Insider Member live event. And you can download a roadmap inside Notion to become an AI-native CFO.
Paulo Tabarelli got a call from an insurance company.
One of his customers had just had their credit insurance revoked.
He didn’t wait for it to show up in the numbers. He went straight to notion and wrote it down: customer X, insurance revoked, flag it if it shows up on tomorrow’s sales report.
All unwritten knowledge evaporates.
A credit controller sends an email. Nobody reads it in time.
A customer goes under. And a month later, the CFO is explaining to the board why the company sold six figures to a company that couldn’t pay, when someone on the team knew three weeks before it happened and said nothing, because there was nowhere to say it.
Paulo has been a CFO three times over, across a multinational FMCG business spanning more than 30 countries, a PE-backed retailer in the UAE, and a telecom in Dubai.
He’s now running finance for a family conglomerate.
And he’s rebuilding the finance function with AI around a loop instead.
Let’s dive in.
Roadmap to becoming an AI-native CFO
Most CFOs don’t fail at AI because they picked the wrong tool.
They fail because they never had a map for where the tool can take them.
Below is that map. Four stages, each one building on the last, from asking AI a question in a browser tab to running a finance function where the loop closes itself.
You won’t be at Level 4 by Friday. Almost nobody is.
Notion’s own research puts fewer than 2% of companies there today. What you can do is place yourself honestly on the curve, see exactly what separates your stage from the next one, and stop mistaking “I use Claude sometimes” for an architecture.
This AI roadmap will help you see how the work itself changes, how AI actually operates at each stage, what it does for the business, and which piece of the skill stack gets built to make it happen.