The CFO's fantasy isn't a dream
4 habits of the CFO of the future
CFO’s fantasy
A $100K analyst manages 3 AI agents.
Each agent delivers $300K in value.
That’s $900K output for $100K input.
An 800% ROI.
Now stretch the model.
What if each agent produces $900K? One human. $2.7M in output.
Push further. Give every analyst a personal AI workforce, custom-trained copilots handling:
Investor reports
Market research
Variance analysis
Scenario modeling
This used to take entire teams.
Now it takes one operator and a few prompts.
Sounds like fantasy? It’s not.
RSM just committed $1B to building this exact future: AI agents embedded across audit, tax, and consulting.
J.P. Morgan is rolling out in-house GPTs to over 200,000 employees, actively reengineering workflows in legal, finance, and risk. Microsoft now has copilots running inside Excel, summarizing models and drafting commentary.
Brex’s finance team is now running leaner and faster, reporting 10x time savings on investor prep using AI tooling.
Top finance teams aren’t theorizing.
They’re reporting 15–20% productivity gains before compounding effects kick in.
But here’s what nobody tells you:
When productivity per head increases, demand doesn’t shrink. It accelerates.
That’s the paradox.
Capitalism doesn’t slow down. It reinvents itself.
When one company uses AI to get 99% margins, another undercuts them to win market share.
Volume surges. Margins collapse. Expectations explode.
Welcome to Jevons’ Paradox in finance: As the cost of intelligence drops, we apply it to everything, from budgeting cycles to M&A.
And that means the role of the CFO… expands.
4 habits of the CFO of the future
Your company isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a living system.
And you are no longer just the scorekeeper. You are the architect.
You must understand this:
Your finance function is an engine. AI is the fuel.
Here are the 4 habits CFOs must build.
Consider these habits as your new operating system.
A framework for rewiring your mind and your team to move from reporting the past to actively designing the future.
Habit 1: You Experiment Daily with AI
Stop waiting for the grand, multi-year AI project. Start now. Start small.
Your team’s attention is your most valuable resource. Right now, it’s being consumed by the mundane: data entry, reconciliation, and manually drafting narratives from tables.
This is like using a supercomputer to run a calculator.
AI offers an immediate “efficiency dividend.”
Automate the Mundane: Use AI to handle the repetitive tasks. Let it extract details from invoices with 95% accuracy. Let it take the first pass at writing a variance analysis from a complex table. This isn’t about replacing people; it’s about liberating them.
Augment the Strategic: With their time freed, your team can now focus on discovery. They can probe deeper, asking questions that were previously too time-consuming to answer. Instead of spending hours reading a competitor's 90-page report, they can ask AI to "extract their public sustainability goals" in seconds.
This is the new workflow. Not a massive project, but a daily habit. A culture of continuous, agile experimentation that transforms your finance team from a cost center into a discovery engine.
Habit 2: You Automate Decisions, Not Just Data
The real power of AI isn’t just processing data faster; it’s automating the decisions that follow.
It’s moving from what happened to what do we do next?
Your business is a game. You need a playbook for every level.
Traditional scenario planning, best, base, and worst-case is a blunt instrument in a volatile world. It’s like planning a road trip with a map from last year.
AI allows you to build dynamic, driver-based models that see the whole board. You don’t just model revenue grows 20%. You model the components.
Revenue = customers × price × retention.
What if a recession hits, slowing acquisition and increasing churn?
A simple model breaks. A dynamic model shows you the secondary effects.
But the model is just the start. The goal is to create a decision matrix.
The Trigger: Quarterly revenue growth drops below 15%.
The Action: Initiate a freeze on all non-essential hiring.
When the trigger is hit, the action is automatic. No panic. No analysis paralysis. Just disciplined execution of a plan made with a clear head. This is what separates the prepared from the perpetually surprised.
But with great automation comes great responsibility. The "human-in-the-loop" isn't a weakness; it's the ultimate control. AI provides the speed and scale, generating thousands of possible futures.
The human provides the wisdom, ethical oversight, and strategic judgment.
Your job is to design this integrated system, deciding what is fully automated and what requires a human signature.
Habit 3: You Quantify Human Performance
Stop treating your people like an expense line.
Start treating them like your most valuable asset.
The future-ready CFO forms a power-alliance with the CHRO. You bring the analytical rigor; they bring the talent expertise. Together, you transform the conversation about people from a "soft" cultural issue to a "hard" strategic imperative.
Your new weapon is Human Capital Value Added (HCVA). It measures the profit contribution of each employee after all other costs are stripped away.
HCVA=Full−TimeEquivalent(FTE)(Revenue−(TotalCosts−EmploymentCost))
Track this metric. Embed it in your P&L. A rising HCVA means your workforce is getting more productive. A falling HCVA is your early warning system for burnout, inefficiency, or a need for better tools.
Then, apply Human Capital ROI (HCROI) to every talent initiative.
HCROI=ProgramCosts(ProgramBenefits−ProgramCosts)
How to set up your ChatGPT to think like a CFO in 10 minutes
Custom instructions are your secret weapon.
If a $250,000 wellness program saves $750,000 in healthcare costs and reduced absenteeism, your HCROI is 2:1.
For every dollar invested, you got two back. This is the language the board understands. It’s how you justify strategic investments in your people and remove the programs that don’t deliver value.
Habit 4: You Translate Complexity into Strategy
Stop reporting numbers. Start telling stories.
You sit at the center of the organization, the only executive with a clear view of data from every single department. This gives you a unique power: the power of translation.
To the CTO, a 5% R&D budget increase is a resource. To sales, it’s a future product. To an investor, it’s a drag on earnings.
You are the translator who creates a single, coherent narrative: This is a strategic investment in future market leadership that will yield new product lines in 18 months.
That’s why we’re accepting a temporary margin dip.
This is not communication. This is governance. It aligns the entire organization around a single strategic vision.
Effective storytelling has 3 parts:
Clarity: Cut through the noise. Find the one or two insights that truly matter.
Context: Explain the "why" behind the numbers. Connect them to the big picture.
Connection: Make it urgent. Make it relevant. Make them act.
Use visuals, metaphors, and real-life examples to make the data memorable. An interactive dashboard that lets you drill down into a sudden expense spike is more powerful than a thousand-row spreadsheet. A story about a customer success humanizes the numbers and makes them stick.
In a world drowning in data, the master storyteller is king.
The Bottom Line
Finance is being rewritten
Old paradigm: You pay people to produce work.
New paradigm: You pay people to orchestrate machines.
Machines that work 24/7.
Machines that never sleep.
Machines that summarize, reconcile, draft, and forecast.
So what does a modern finance professional do?
They become the director. They:
Set standards
Check quality
Apply judgment
Steer the narrative
You still need human taste. And taste is rare.
The best CFOs won’t be buried in spreadsheets.
They’ll be spending time shaping workflows.
Designing decision-making systems.
Training AI agents to understand how their company thinks.
This isn’t replacing your team. It’s multiplying their capacity.
And that’s all for today.
See you on Thursday!
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.
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I’m Wouter Born. A CFOTech investor, advisor, and founder of finstory.ai
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