Yesterday, Nitin Madan joined me live. He spent more than 20 years helping companies transform their finance functions, then three years as CFO of a global operations hub of about 30,000 people.
He didn’t give us the polished version.
He told us what worked, what got blocked, and why.
Here are a few things he shared:
Payback takes longer than you’d hope. In his experience, AI’s productivity gain in finance was not overwhelming, and the payback ran about three years.
Security is the real gate. In a regulated company, finance data is often classified secret, and that alone can stop an AI design from ever going live.
Where AI does deliver: intercompany matching and reconciliation, anomaly detection in the close, and pulling commentary from many entities together into one story.
Make this board meeting boring. That’s what he tells his controllers. His rule for AI board decks is that they should be AI-populated, not AI-generated.
Hold a no-AI day so your team doesn’t forget how to work without it.
Below, members get the full recording, his maturity model, and timestamps so you can jump straight to the part you need.