How to learn any skill in finance 10x faster than anyone with AI
Everything you want to learn is a single prompt away.
Let me be blunt.
Most finance professionals are drowning in complexity, crushed by time, and still trying to learn like it’s 1999.
PDFs
Weekend seminars
40-hour video courses.
Building soft and hard skills in finance is a pain by design.
Ask any controller, FP&A analyst, or CFO how they learned the hard stuff. They’ll tell you about the war of attrition.
It was a system designed to filter, not to teach. Certifications like the CFA were a multi-year crucible, demanding 3-5 years of your life with pass rates so low they were practically a coin flip. Corporate training was a one-size-fits-none joke.
Generic workshops that pulled you from critical work to teach you skills that were already outdated.
The whole system is a bottleneck. It teaches you how to report on the past, not predict the future. It creates technicians, not strategists.
And technicians are a commodity.
In today’s edition, I’ll show you how you can learn 10x faster in finance with AI and why every CFO, Controller, and FP&A must try new ways of learning.
Let’s dive in.
Learning Concepts
How do you learn a complex new skill, like building a Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model to assess a major investment?
Step 1: I asked ChatGPT using the following prompt.
I’m the CFO of Born2Cycle, a bike retailer with several stores across Portland and Seattle. We’re evaluating whether to open a new store in Spokane, and I want to understand how to use a Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model to assess if the investment makes financial sense. Can you explain how DCF works and what inputs I should focus on?It gave me a clear, solid explanation of what a DCF is and what inputs I need (projected cash flows, discount rate, and terminal value). It was fast but surface-level.
A decent summary. But it didn’t make me smarter.
Step 2: I turned on Study Mode and asked the same question.
The AI isn’t just spitting out answers. It acts like a real tutor now.
Study Mode uses a real instructional design technique called scaffolding.
It layers knowledge gradually:
Concept: introduces intuition (what DCF means in plain terms)
Structure: breaks the process into logical steps
Application: gives real data inputs or a scenario (Born2Cycle store)
Reinforcement: prompts you to summarize or apply it
In essence, you learn through doing, not just reading.
We’re not finished yet.
ChatGPT has the Coursera App built inside so now let’s test it.
ChatGPT x Coursera App
I wanted to learn basic Python, a critical skill for any finance professional tired of watching Excel crash on large datasets. So I asked ChatGPT to leverage its Coursera integration.
ChatGPT kicks off a training video to use Python for financial analysis, a very relevant choice.
The impressive part isn’t that ChatGPT can play a video. It’s that it turns the video into a live conversation. You can pause, question, and explore the lesson as it happens.
ChatGPT knows what I’m watching.
This is what 10x faster learning looks like:
Not passive, but engaged.
Not general, but contextual.
Not watching, but interacting.
And it’s not just for juniors or analysts. CFOs can use this to:
Build CapEx cases.
Draft investor-ready narratives.
Learn the mechanics of SaaS metrics they’ve never seen before.
AI learning is fast, interactive, and brutally effective.
Traditional learning can’t compete:
You binge PDFs and retain nothing.
You pretend to understand until a VP grills you.
You waste hours scrubbing through videos for a 2-minute answer.
AI flips that. You get:
Instant answers, tailored to your exact experience level.
An interactive tutor who works at 11 pm, never judges, and never sleeps.
Automation of the mundane, freeing your brain for actual strategic thought.
It's like having an ex-McKinsey analyst, a Python engineer, and an FP&A director on call 24/7.
The Bottom Line
You can keep pretending those 40-hour courses will teach you what you need.
Or you can open an AI, turn on study mode, and ask your next hard question.
Build your next DCF model live with an AI tutor.
Learn Python syntax inside a real finance case.
Drill EBITDA scenarios until you master them.
Everything you want to learn is a single prompt away.
The future of finance is being architected right now.
The choice is simple: be an architect or become an artifact.
Your career depends on that answer.
If you like what you read here, you’ll love this.
How to do advanced financial modeling with AI in 5 minutes
I spent 25 years in finance so let’s talk directly without any BS.
And that’s all for today.
See you on Thursday!
Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
The sponsorships for this year are now closed. We’ll start taking new sponsorships again in January. Advertise with the AI CFO Office.
If you’re building an AI-powered CFO tech startup, I’d love to hear more and explore if it’s a fit for our investment portfolio.
I’m Wouter Born. A CFOTech investor, advisor, and founder of finstory.ai
Find me on LinkedIn