The first 90 days as a CFO
What to do on Day 1 as a CFO and where to use AI. I sat down with a CFO who’s run finance inside multinational businesses.
READ TIME: 7 MINUTES
I sat down with a secret CFO who’s run finance inside multinational businesses, from 400 million to multi-billion. We didn’t talk theory. We talked about what happens when you walk in on Day 1 and the clock starts.
Most new CFOs think the first 90 days are about control.
This CFO said something cleaner and more brutal.
The analysis is the easy part.
If you go to the numbers before you earn the truth, you can build a perfect plan… on the wrong reality.
That’s how capable CFOs fail early.
So here’s the playbook every new CFO wishes they had in their first CFO role, updated for 2026 and grounded in how the CFO job unfolds when the pressure is real.
It’s structured by time, with the workflows, emotional truths, dangers, and exactly how AI fits.
Let’s dive in.
Prepare for Day 1
Build your truth map before you build your model.
What you’re really doing is you’re not prepping. You’re building your stakeholder map with people who know how things work.
Investors.
Operators.
Leadership team.
Business leaders.
A simple workflow to follow
A. Stakeholder map (1 page)
CEO
Board/key investors
BU leaders/product/sales/ops
Your direct reports (-1) and key lieutenants (-2)
CIO/data owner
External: auditors/banks (if relevant)
B. Reality questions you carry into every meeting
Where does margin leak?
Where do people not trust the numbers?
What is everyone pretending isn’t urgent?
How does this business actually make money?
What’s the #1 recurring fight between functions?
You can use AI to compress reading time so you can spend your time having conversations.
If you have a secure environment (think ChatGPT for Enterprise/internal), you can load:
Strategy plans.
Board minutes.
Last board decks.
Management reports/forecast memos.
Ask AI to output:
Inconsistencies in narrative vs. numbers.
Recurring concerns over the last 12–18 months.
Repeated assumptions that never get challenged.
Decision patterns: what gets approved vs. delayed.
AI saves time, but you must absorb the knowledge yourself.
Most new CFOs aren’t scared of the work. They’re scared of being wrong publicly before they understand the politics and context.
So don’t walk in and sound smart too early.
That can shut mouths instantly… especially if you trigger defensiveness in ops or sales.
1) Days 1–7
Become part of the team before you try to change them.
On your first day you must be excited and not nervous.
You must be thinking, why pay? At the AI CFO Office, we create a lot of value for CFOs and finance leaders. We interview top CFOs, we fly them in, we get into the finance frustrations, and we join sessions with CFO groups to understand AI, storytelling, finance pains and career demands. We hold live events and talk to many founders building in the CFO Tech space. And yet we are really hard on sponsors. That’s the reason you haven’t noticed any banner ads. So we can’t stay free forever.